Google's Walls Come Crashing Down

Google's new privacy provisions tear down the data-sharing barriers between its services, allowing the company to get an across-the-board view of all its users' habits. The move will allow it to leverage even more data for ad sales, but regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have expressed major concerns. Meanwhile, Yahoo squeezes Facebook, Proview squeezes Apple, and Apple mulls a dividend.

If you've visited basically any of Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) major services over the last several weeks, you may have noticed a little orange box that pops up as soon as you get to the page, sometimes hanging out right over the spot you wish you could click.

"We're changing our privacy policy and terms. This stuff matters. Learn more or dismiss."

By now a lot of people are used to seeing policy and ToS and EULA updates so often that one more notice from yet another service that they use on a daily basis just ends up in their mental spam filters. Either they really don't care about the gory details of how Google chews up our data, digests it and excretes ads, or they just don't want to know, ignorance being bliss and all.

If that's you, though, plug your ears, 'cause here's what just happened: Starting March 1, Google began operating under a new, unified privacy policy. What used to be 60 separate policies have been mashed into a single one overnight. And under that policy, Google's begun combining what it knows about your activities across its services. Until now, that data wasn't shared among Google properties, but now Google Maps knows your Web searches, Contacts sees your news-reading habits, Gmail gets to know your YouTube views, etc. Anything you do with Google while signed into an account goes on your permanent Google record.

This will no doubt give Google better ad-selling leverage, but it's also telling users there'll be some benefits for them too, mostly in the ways its services will be able to give them more personalized results. And the company's maintained that all this data will remain in Google's hands -- it won't sell it or give it to a third party unless there's a court order.

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