Goodbye, Google

Our family shut down all of our Google related services with the announcement of their new privacy (non-privacy) polices.  Looks like Bing will be our search engine and Hotmail migrated all of our gmail accounts and calendars across, seemingly, seamlessly.  I will remain at swood [at] wearestandrews [dot] com.

The Washington Post had this article on the new policy:

Google’s announcement that it is sharing more user data across its services has already raised the hackles of privacy advocates, technology writers and caught the attention of at least one national data-protection agency.

On Tuesday, the search giant announced that it was placing 60 of its Web services under a unified privacy policy that would allow the company to share data between any of those services. (Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome are excluded due to different regulatory and technical issues.) Any user with a Google account — used to sign in to services such as Gmail, YouTube and personalized search — must agree to the policy. Users who don’t want to have their data shared have the option to close their accounts with Google.

What kind of information are they collecting and integrating?:

Google collects and can integrate almost anything that’s already in the Google ecosystem: calendar appointments, location data, search preferences, contacts, personal habits based on Gmail chatter, device information and search queries, to name a few.

A little later in the article it says by collecting such information Google will be able to send you a reminder, based on having identified your location, as to whether you might be running late for an upcoming meeting – or, it will auto correct the mis-spelling of a name in a document based on its spelling in your contact file.

Creepily invasive.

Read the rest.