So does Google’s new privacy policy put me at risk for being “outed” as kinky?
So I’ve been trying to read up on Google’s new privacy policy changes, which will go into effect March first. Wired explains,
“On the Official Google Blog, a post by Alma Whitten, Google’s Director of Privacy, explains how this new privacy policy will affect users: “Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Whitten writes [emphasis mine]. “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”
So far, this seems like it won’t be a problem for me. I have separate accounts for everything (for example, I don’t answer my Fetlife email and my vanilla email from the same account; I only favorite videos under my MollyRen YouTube account because YouTube is where I find most of my fetish videos.) If each of my Google accounts is seen separately, after March 1st I’ll have a kink account with all the sex stuff, and a vanilla account that I hardly ever use.
But then I got to this in Gizmodo’s article about how Google is now evil:
“What this means for you is that data from the things you search for, the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps, the videos you watch in YouTube, the discussions you have on Google+ will all be collected in one place. It seems like it will particularly affect Android users, whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users), Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs. And if you have signed up for Google+, odds are the company even knows your real name, as it still places hurdles in front of using a pseudonym (although it no longer explicitly requires users to go by their real names).”
Guess where I regularly check both my vanilla Gmail and kink Gmail accounts from? My shiny new Android phone.
Guys, this is where my technical ignorance comes in. Will Google make the connection between two Gmail accounts I’m checking from the same phone? What will they do with the information? Should I yank all my vanilla stuff from Gmail (which would be a hell of a lot easier than undoing all my kink stuff)? Should I just unplug my kink account from my phone, and do all my browsing in Firefox?
I’m honestly unsure what to do next, except read a whole lot more…or just write Google an angry email.