Translating Google’s Privacy Policy
Privacy may not have been much of a controversy with Google 6 years ago when they were only performing web searches at the time with no advertising, personalization, behavior tracking, or offering questionable web usage tracking software such as Google Sidebar’s Web Clips. With plans for a Google Wi-Fi network and more desktop offerings via their partnership with Sun Microsystems, Google Privacy has become a target for the Ben Edelmen’s of the world who are perched and ready to swoop down, picking apart Google’s “Do No Evil” gospel.
Google has just released a new updated privacy policy, and Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel at Google, addresses user concerns on the Google Blog :
We know privacy is important to our users, and it’s important to us, too. That’s why we work hard to let people know how we collect and use personal information to provide our services. A clearly written privacy policy is part of this effort. In this update, most of the terms are the same, but there are two important differences:
First, we created a short, one-page “highlights” notice summarizing our privacy practices. We hope this is easy to digest and understand at a glance. Second, we provided even more detail about our privacy practices in the full-text privacy policy and lots more detail in the accompanying FAQs. The goal of both is to help you make informed choices about using our services.
Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped takes the Google Privacy Policy Highlights a bit deeper with his Layman’s Translation of Google’s Privacy Policy. Here’s an example:
Google Speak : We make good faith efforts to provide you access to your personal information upon request and to let you correct such data if it is inaccurate and delete it, when reasonably possible.
English : Dude, it’s not like we steal your secrets and you won’t ever see them again. You can even delete some if you want. God, you really do have something to hide, don’t you?
