Google's new privacy policy and TOS

I saw a talk at defcon by a former google employee named Brian Kennish, author of disconnect.me. He said that google has 3 data sources in particular that, if tied together, would be very worrisome. Those were:<p>Google Analytics - Every time you visit a page with this javascript, google obviously receives a get request from your IP address<p>+1 Button - Similar to what facebook is doing, hits for the +1 button, whether you click it or not, are another GET request to google<p>Your google account - if logged in, they obviously have a ton of information about you.<p>If I recall correctly, he said that the idea of tying these together came up frequently, but has always been shot down as too invasive. At the time, he said he believed they had no plans to ever do this when he left the company. Doing this would be easy, and would tie nearly all of your browsing activity to your google account. That, to me, is evil.<p>This update sounds suspiciously like they have gone ahead with this idea. If so, I don't understand how people are ok with this.

Disregarding all the other discussions going around about Google, I think this is a great approach to get the user to know the TOS, I hope many more companies follow this path.<p>In fact, now that I think of it, it is the first time I have fully read a TOS agreement (as a user), I thought it was simple and clear, though IANAL and I'm not sure about the legal implications.

Of late, I've paid attention to how many letters I must type into "google" before it generates an auto-completed phrase I'm searching for.<p>I am profoundly impressed by how little typing is required. It certainly feels like communicating with an artificial intelligence.<p>This feels like value created on a giant scale.<p>My father was one of the first computer programmers: starting sometime around the late 50's, he wrote code in a language called octal, using vacuum tubes and wires. One of his first projects was to write a routine to calculate square roots.<p>Fifty years later, a computer knows that when I type "toc", I'm probably looking for the "Tournament of Champions Squash Tournament" presently being held in Grand Central Station. Remarkable.

I've been seeing this new development being characterized as Google's "evil" moment, but I'm not convinced. I thought it was more evil when they changed account creation last week to require both a Gmail and G+ account. That's bad for users. This doesn't seem that way to me.

"new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services"<p>Google, you were nice enough to provide a toggle button to turn off the personal search feature. Now, could you be nice enough to provide an option to opt-out of this combined-information utopia of yours? I don't want to participate in this combined information experiment.

There is so much talk about SPYW and its evil implications. If google just adds a new tab , saying social search , wont that solve the problems. And if twitter wants to share its tweets , fine , lets get twitter on board as well. And I dont think facebook will let google access its data , and it might still say its evil.

The TOS is short, but the arguably more important Privacy Policy for Google products is still huge: <a href="http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/</a>

I can't be the only person who assumed Google already shared data between it's properties, right? I don't go into the grocery store and assume what I buy in produce is hidden from what I buy in the deli.<p>In fact, I want this. I use Google services for their convenience and function. If the things I share on Google+ or the videos I view on youtube alter the ads I see, it probably makes them far more relevant. And it's honestly about 1 time in 500 I don't get what I was looking for in the top 10 results in a regular search, even when logged in.