The revamped Google privacy policy which surfaced last month has raised several concerns from both critics and users. In fact, many even questioned Google’s age-old motto “Don’t be evil”. Vic Gundtora, the brains behind Google’s social network recently told users that they were welcome to stop using Google services if they believed that the company had ever contradicted its motto. He stressed that public trust was very important to a company and if that is broken the company will soon lose to its competitors.
According to the policy which has been in effect from March 1st, Google won’t collect information from users for every Google service they use. All Google will do now is compile the information collected from Gmail, YouTube and other Google services in a unified manner which will be accessible by all Google services (including Android). Many watchdogs and lawmakers alike have expressed concerns over the policy being too insidious. Gundotra added that Google+ has an important role to play in this new policy, as the user’s profiles will help Google in understanding the likes and dislikes of a user and display advertisements accordingly. All these changes are aimed at improving the Google interface and making it a better experience on the whole.
Gundotra even defended the much criticized Google+ and justified the role that the website will play Google’s new policy. ComScore, the popular Web analytics firm reported a few days ago that users spent an average of just 3.3 minutes on the site. This was based on a study in the month of January. This report was released just weeks after the Google CEO announced that the site had hit 90 million users. Vic went on to say that the site now had 100 million users and was seeing increasing activity every day. He continued by saying Google+ shouldn’t be used to measure the success of a network of services as provided by Google.
He went on to say that comparing Facebook and Google+ was not apt and a more logical comparison would be comparing the entire Google enterprise and Facebook as a whole. He compared the two on the basis of the number of users utilizing the two enterprises. He also commented on Facebook’s policy of allowing developers to create third party apps and said Google was slow in doing so because it was running tests on its programming system to make sure it is perfect before opening it up to outside developers.
March 13, 2012 at 3:04 am
comparing Facebook and Google+ was not apt and a more logical comparison would be comparing the entire Google enterprise and Facebook as a whole.