Google+ has made Google unfriendly.
In its new privacy policy, which all Google users must accept on Mar. 1, Google says in plain language:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.
So this is not at all a "privacy" policy. It is a "publicity" policy. It is the exact opposite of a privacy policy. What is really says is quite simple:
"Our policy is that there isn't any privacy; everything is public."
That would have taken far fewer words than the ones Google's lawyers chose to mask the real meaning.
This license is simply too broad for me. While I applaud Google's effort to rid the world of legal mumbo-jumbo, in the process of rewriting its privacy policy, Google has taken advantage of its users by granting itself far more power than most users want Google to have. And, no doubt, Google is heavily relying on users not to read the privacy policy, since most never bother to do so.
This is what created so many problems for Facebook in years past. And in a stupid effort to topple Facebook, Google has changed its focus from being an excellent provider of user services to a social networking tool that many never wanted or needed. Indeed, virtually none of my friends, family and acquaintances joined Google+ and probably never will. What they wanted was the ease of use that Google's services provided.
Google, you want to be all things to all people. It won't work. Stop it and go back to doing what you once did well: totally unbiased search, excellent email, great photo storage, wonderful voice mail, and so many other useful services. Wrapping this all together in a way that users haven't requested is doing the very kind of evil that your founders eschewed.
It would be different if the new policy invited users to go to the Google Dashboard and link those services that the user wanted to be shared. But as with most companies, Google has chosen the approach that is most irritating: the default for everything is on, and it can't be changed by the user.
For me, this policy change means I will have to withdraw from participating in Google+ before Mar. 1, and it likely means I will have to start finding alternatives to the many Google services I currently use, since being logged in subjects me to Google's whims and future policy changes. This saddens me, because I had been a great supporter -- indeed, a cheerleader -- for Google products. But I relied too much upon Google's promise to "do no evil." I thought Larry and Sergey really meant what they said. And I guess they did -- at the time. Now, it's all about the money.
It's a mystery to me how companies can become so blind so quickly. I left Facebook a couple of years ago when it implemented a similar "everything is ours" policy. Netflix, which had been churning along nicely until its CEO repeatedly shot himself in the foot, lost my business last year. In its own way, Google is now aiming at its foot.
I don't think I want to wait around for the fallout.
Google has been tying together their various services for quite some time. they are making it harder for users to get value from their services. because thats what happens when they destroy user preferences to implement their own preferences.
and the reason Google keeps adding on more bells and whistles is that they are over valuated. they have become a portfolio to justify their over inflated valuation.
it's all i ever use.
First of all, copyright law embodies a basic assumption that content is generally distributed by commercial publishing firms and licensed to a considerably larger number of consumers, but in modern web architecture, the users in their large numbers are very often the content creators, and the licensed recipients are very often extremely resourceful commercial entities.
Further consider that any data handled by Google and other major web services is stored in a distributed fault-tolerant data system which automatically replicates data across multiple servers in multiple data centers around the world. Indexed lookup tables are generated from the data, replicated, and distributed across the storage architecture. HTTP requests and their responses are cached in a distributed content delivery network.
In short, your data is copied, modified, and redistributed as a matter of course, all before your data is shared with anybody in the conventional sense. It's the only way that Google can manage and serve data reliably and efficiently on such a large scale.
This is a nightmare for Google's copyright lawyers. The mere act of writing user data into their storage architecture is copyright infringement unless they have a very broad copyright license for that data allowing for unconditional copying and distribution in modified or unmodified form. The license is so broad because copyright law couldn't have imagined the way that hyperscale web services would someday manage yottabytes of externally-originated data.
So while they claim a right to copy, alter, publish and perform, that license is limited to the operation of the service. If I keep a document on their doc. service but do not allow the document to be shared as per their own doc. controls, how could they publish or share the doc pursuant to this license? The same question for original music contained on their cloud. I don't share it as part of the protocols of the cloud service and neither can they unless they claim to do so in order to operate the service.
At any rate, I'm removing sensitive material from all of their services. There are no secrets on the Internet. I did like their doc service, too bad. They just want to be able to sell their service to advertisers, but that's my privacy, and it's worth something to me.
Likewise, look for and find other calendar-sharing, contacts-sharing and so on services which allow you to store =your= personal information in the cloud but in an encrypted form. You will have to buy a subscription to such services because they aren't supported by advertising or by reading over your shoulder, but they do exist and have always existed.
You must step outside the comfortable velvet box of convenience, but only slightly so.
Encrypting your e-mail and so-forth is no more "illegitimate," and no more "unwise," than routinely using an https-encrypted web site to conduct business on the Net. (Although the two technologies are not the same, the very legitimate reasons for choosing to use them, are.) If you do not want your content to persist forever, in a form that anyone can read at any time in the future and they very well might, then =you= must protect it yourself from disclosure. And, be prepared that people who have been silently making their "friendly and convenient" living by peeking into everything(!) that you say, far more intrusively than you ever paused to think that they might do, will no longer be willing to handle your traffic for free.
It's fun to dream. But eventually, you have to wake up.
There should be a law to outlaw this type of abuse. Just because Google has the power to do something, doesn't mean it is right to do it... Just because manufacturers can create and sell a harmful product, doesn't mean they should be allowed to it.