While the Play Store usually gets more billing, the Chrome Web Store serves an equally large audience and is full of many useful apps and extensions. Google is updating the User Data Policy for the store with more stronger policies in regards to user data.
Today, YouTube announced that it’s deploying a new process to improve the accuracy of subscriber accounts on user channels. On June 16th, Google’s video sharing platform will start pruning suspended accounts from channel subscription counts. Although this will cause a drop in subscribers for some YouTubers, it shouldn’t have any type of impact on their video views, because suspended accounts aren’t active.
The National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties announced today that Google’s new privacy policy might violate European Union law.
The allegation comes just days before the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant planned to enact the policy that unveiled last month. Google said the updated policy streamlined privacy practices for 60 different services engaged around the globe to bring transparency and clarity.
“We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read,” explained Google’s policy website.
A portion of the letter.
The French privacy agency picked a bone with the search engine’s intent and wrote a letter (PDF) to Google’s Chief Executive Officer Larry Page that painted the new rules as questionable. The central focus of the letter inquired how Google would use the reaped private data, but it is well-known the advertising firm collects personal information from tracking cookies to build targeted ads.
“Rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices,” wrote the agency, also known as CNIL, in the letter. “Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals.”
The new policy takes effect March 1, and while users’ privacy preferences remain, the new arrangement allows Google to gather and implement user data across its services. Google is charging ahead with Search plus Your World, Gmail, Picasa, YouTube, and Google+, so it is probably just connecting all the loose legal ends to make one continuous experience….
