Google tweaks their privacy policies

[nsane.forums]

Google has announced a number of changes to their privacy policy, making them more simplified and removing some of the complicated "lawyer" terminology.

In a post on the official Google blog, Mike Yang, Google's Associate General Counsel, confirmed the changes would be put in place on October 3, with users prompted on many popular Google services today to check over the new policy before it goes live next month.

"Long, complicated and lawyerly—that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason," Yang wrote. "So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. We want to make our policies more transparent and understandable."

So what's changed? Google has always had a company-wide privacy policy for all users on every product - but some, such as Gmail and Docs, had their own adapted versions of the policy. That will soon no longer be the case, Google says, with 12 of the product-specific privacy policies to be scrapped in favor of the one streamlined approach.

The company is also removing redundant parts of the privacy policy as well as "rewriting" the more legalistic sentences in the document with the hopes of making the policy more relevant and understandable for everyone - not just the lawyers.

Yang also mentions the search giant will be posting more content on how to keep your information private in certain Google applications on their respective support websites, while a page describing tools that can be used to improve privacy has been already been added to the Google Privacy Center.

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