New Google privacy policy takes effect

Despite continued objections to the changes from a variety of consumer groups and regulators, Google has moved forward with its new privacy policy on March 1.

The new policy, announced back in January, now states that the search engine marketing giant will combine information from signed-in users across the vast majority of Google products, in order to show them more relevant advertising and search results. The idea is to treat an individual as a single user across all products, though Chrome, Chrome OS, Books and Google Wallet are exempted for a variety of reasons. Overall, some 60 privacy policies are being merged into one.

According to a new blog post by Google's Director of privacy, product and engineering, "the new policy doesn't change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google."

However, the changes have been the subject of much criticism, including the French data protection regulators who are leading the pan-European Article 29 Working Party's investigation on the proposals, recently declaring them unlawful and asked Google to postpone the changes.

Of course, consumers worried about how the policies can always sign out of their account at any time, or indeed not log on; but given the advantages of having a unified account and the general inertia of most mainstream consumers, this is likely to be a minority reaction.

With the EU Justice Commissioner having told the BBC that the policy is in breach of European Law, expect the chatter around this to run and run.