When Privacy is No Longer Convenient

On February 9, 2010, Google provided an extensive Gmail privacy notice on their site. Here are two areas on the site that might be of interests to readers:

Information sharing and onward transfer

--When you send email, Google includes information such as your email address and the email itself as part of that email.

--We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked.

--We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

Your choices

--You may change your Gmail account settings through the Gmail "settings" section.

--You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

The public's criticism of Google certainly extends back further than recent issues with China.

This 2007 CBC news clip highlights Google privacy issues beyond the U.S. borders. Newscaster Nancy Wilson amps up the fear factor usually devoted to Fox News but does so with an endearing Canadian accent. Bill O'Reilly, take note. Please practice your Canadian accent.

Here's another clip that relies upon similar scare tactics but provides spiffy graphics and a British accent. (Anyone seen 28 Days Later recently?)

A year later, the impetuous Rachel Maddow from MSNBC interviews CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, about Google privacy issues and highlights how our good friend, free market capitalism, will play a role in determining at what point Google users will shift to a less "sinister" competitor.