Rainbow: Google is tracking your personal info

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You probably haven't taken the time to read Google's new privacy policy.

Even though Google keeps begging you to.

Even though it interrupts you almost every time you go online. "This stuff matters," Google says. Please read our new policy, understand it — care.

Well, OK, I've read it. I've spent some time making sense of Google's policy change, and I think can sum it up for you:

Google knows you better than your own mother. It has a file on you that would make J. Edgar Hoover salivate. And now they're going to hang onto that file and pretty much do whatever they want with it. But don't worry because they haven't done anything scary yet, and they promise not to be evil. Kthxbai.

The new policy, set to take effect March 1, isn't actually that different from Google's existing privacy policies. Google is already keeping track of your searches and email content and using it to target advertising at you.

But now Google is going to merge that information across all of its products. So if you use Gmail, Google Search, Google+, Google Maps, Google Reader and YouTube, Google is going to keep track of your activity on all those sites and associate it with your real identity.

"If the state had access to this database," says digital media scholar Damien Pfister, "people would freak out. It's the ultimate Big Brother/Orwellian situation."

Pfister is an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (I know this for sure because I Googled him.)

And he says that Google probably already knows more about him than any other company or human being — except for maybe his wife. "And that's up for grabs."

To get a sense of how intimately and completely Google understands you, just think about how you use it .

If you work at a computer, you probably keep an Internet browser window open while you work, and you probably search with Google. Maybe you keep Gmail open, too. Maybe Google is also the go-to search engine on your smart phone.

All day long, when you have a question — when you want to doublecheck something, when you're feeling confused or bored or curious — you turn to Google.

You ask Google things that you never speak out loud.

You ask Google things before you fully think them through.

When you look back at your Google search history, it's like looking back through a log of your thoughts. Google has a better record of what you were thinking than you do.

What you were thinking (Google Search). What you were reading (Google Books). What you were talking about (Gmail, Google+). What you were watching (YouTube). And where you were you at the time (Google Maps).

I've spent the last week researching this story on Google News, emailing sources through Gmail, and running Google searches for "Google privacy" and "Google lawsuit." Google knows exactly what I'm doing right now.

Many non-Google sites track your usage and personal info, too — read those privacy policies — but no one else has the same access that Google does. No other company has the same coverage or scope.

We give the folks at Google all this information in exchange for their services, which are, let's face it, excellent. Maybe even unparalleled.

But most of us aren't even thinking about what Google does with that information..

"There's a tremendous amount of trust," Pfister says.

"We're essentially banking on Google to stick to its slogan — don't be evil."

Google, for its part, says that the new privacy policy actually serves users.

For example, the company will be able to use your personal information to show you advertising that's more relevant to you. It can merge data across Google services to make your life easier. How?

Well, here are some helpful examples from a blog post written by the company's director of Privacy, Product and Engineering:

"We can provide reminders that you're going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends' names, are accurate because you've typed them before."

I don't know about you, but that creeps me out.

That creeps me right through the floor.

I don't want Google to know my friends' names. I don't want Google to know that I'm running late for a meeting. I don't want a corporation to follow me everywhere.

I'm right to feel that way, says David Jacobs, consumer privacy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The watchdog group has filed a federal lawsuit, trying to stop Google's new privacy policy.

The issue goes way beyond targeted advertising, Jacobs says. What if the state gets access to your Google profile?

"There are civil liberties implications that come from making more information available to law enforcement," he says. "Most of this information can be accessed without a search warrant."

Jacobs cited a survey showing that about 90 percent of consumers — or, as I like to call them, people — are, like me, worried about online privacy.

But you're more likely to worry about it, Professor Pfister says, the older you are.

Many of his undergraduate students, he says, don't have the same expectation or desire for privacy. They think nothing of sharing their personal information on Facebook — another site that mines your usage — and leaving their profiles open to the world.

Are they right to do so?

As a journalist, I believe that we're usually better served as a society the more open we are. Freedom of information, transparency, sunshine, all that jazz.

But Google is mining our brains — and our identities — for profit. It's staking a claim on our personal information, owning it in a way that no one else does, not the government, not even ourselves.

In a larger sense, it's setting a tone for the Internet, that the web is a for-profit environment, not a public space.

Google is right — this stuff matters.

And we don't have to go along with it. We can opt out.

Well, sort of. You can't actually opt out of Google's privacy policy. But you can manage what the company tracks to some extent using two Google privacy features — Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager.

Or you can just stop using Google services — especially services that require log-ins. If you're not logged in to a Google service, the company says it won't track your data.

Giving up Google seems impossible to me. Just giving up Gmail at this point would be a huge sacrifice .

Pfister agrees. Even after throwing around words like "Big Brother" and "Orwellian," he says he's more of a Google user than ever. He's not opting out.

"I'm too embedded in the system."

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