Hello - Google’s New Privacy Policy Starts Today!

Effective March 1st, that’s today, Google is implementing a new privacy policy across all of its web sites.  Individual privacy policies (i.e. Gmail, Google+, YouTube etc.) will be streamlined into a single policy that covers all sites.  Google first announced this change back in January and it has since created a lot of buzz about what Google’s actually up to. 

The big change, and it is a big one, is that with a single policy to cover all sites, Google will no longer treat your Gmail, Google+ and YouTube etc. sites as separate entities.  Google now sees you as just one user with a lot of different interests.  This change will most likely make it easier for Google to target you with relevant ads and thus make more money for both them and their advertisers.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

To see what kind of information Google has already collected on you, just go to http://www.google.com/dashboard.   After you sign in, you will see a page showing all kinds of data that Google has collected including the number of Google alerts the user has set, information shared through Google+ profiles, connected devices, Google Calendar information, number of and most-used Google contacts, number of sent and deleted emails and YouTube profile information. 

Here’s a partial excerpt of some of the info Google has on me:

If you are concerned, bothered or even angry about Google collecting all of this info then you can delete Google’s search history by going to google.com/history and logging in.  To remove all search history: After logging in, select "Remove all Web History" and confirm by clicking "OK." This will also pause web history, preventing Google from storing further search data.  Incidentally, I’m one of those who wasn’t concerned about the old policy and am not bothered by Google’s new policy either.

Under the new privacy policy, Google will not be collecting any additional information about users.  They will definitely, however, be able to do more with the information it learns about its users.  According to Google’s online privacy policy they do not sell users' personal data and all the information they have about you is private. 

Google will soon hit the 1 Exabyte storage mark – 1 Billion Gigabytes

The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term.  It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

One of the questions I’ve always wondered about is this:  “Just how big is Google anyway and how to they store all of this information”.  In doing some research on this question, the most common answer I found was this:  Google is massive!!  They dwarf all other Internet and software development companies combined in terms of data storage. 

Google’s massive storage capacity, (1 million servers) compared to other companies

At the present time, Google is estimated to have as many as 1 million servers on 15 server farms all over the world.  Intel Corp. is second with a measly 100,000 servers while Facebook numbers about 30,000.  Companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are not on the above chart as they are pretty good at keeping this stuff a secret.  So is Google but they are so big it’s hard to hide all of their server farms.  In any event, even Microsoft, Apple and Amazon wouldn’t be close to Google in terms of server capacity.

How do you feel about this new ‘single’ Google Privacy Policy?

Have a great Thursday, and thanks again for visiting!