The Hill News

The line between providing a dynamic service and violating customers’ privacy can be a thin one in the 21st century. As technology giants strive for one-touch solutions across multiple platforms to create a more convenient experience for their customers, they must avoid misusing these customers’ personal information. The case-in-point for this struggle appears to be Google’s new privacy policy, which three dozen state attorneys general â€" myself included â€" and consumer protection officials asked the company to reconsider last week.

Google justifies its new privacy policyâ€"which was implemented todayâ€"by arguing it needs to consolidate roughly 60 product-specific privacy policies into one comprehensive policy in order to improve the user experience and make its privacy policies and practices more understandable. Google claims that the unified privacy policy will not change or expand the information it collects about its users. Rather, Google argues th! at it will merely combine data collected by one Google service with information about that same user that was collected by other Google servicesâ€"effectively treating the customer as a single user across all services.

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