While Microsoft makes the same changes without anyone noticing

Oct 15, 2012 15:41 GMT  ·  By

Google's decision to unify its privacy policy earlier this year and to permit its products to share data with each other was met with huge amounts of criticism. While the criticism has died off, government bodies out for blood didn't.

The EU is now getting ready to ask Google to revert the move and provide its users with the opportunity to opt out of the changes, rumors say.

The French data protection commissioner, CNIL, has been investigating the privacy policy changes, with its decision affecting the entire EU.

CNIL is known to be rather aggressive, so it deciding that Google needs to revert the move should not be surprising.

It will be interesting to see how Google reacts to the move though; it made it clear previously that it did not believe its changes violated EU privacy laws or were against the spirit of those laws.

CNIL had already warned Google to stop its planned privacy policy changes before those changes went into effect, but Google did not comply.

It's safe to assume Google won't roll over and give up this time around too, so things will escalate. Just how far is anyone's guess at this point.

What's ridiculous is that all of this is over nothing. Citing privacy concerns because Google can now access data it already had access to does not make a lot of sense.

If people trusted Google with the data in the first place, they're going to trust it even if Google Search data is now available to YouTube. If they don't trust Google they can simply stop using it or, at the very least, not use it while logged in.

They don't have much choice besides that, Microsoft was quick to "point out" Google's privacy policy changes, while conveniently leaving out the part where its privacy policy already allowed it to do what Google wanted to change.

Microsoft made further changes to some of its privacy policies, further enabling it to share data between products. But Microsoft made no fuss about it and few people even realized it happened.

Google, on the other hand, publicized the changes and notified all users about them. Sometimes it pays to just keep quiet and complain about others hoping no one will notice your problems.