"Please provide 3 misleading examples."Google's privacy policy is not misleading but they omit some of the most important information you would expect to find in a privacy policy.
When you sign up for a Google account you give Google your name, date-of-birth (DOB), location and mobile phone number. This is some of your most private and personal details. If you're signed in to your Google account while you browse the web or use your Android phone (or you use the track-everything-you-do Chrome OS), then Google records your browing habits and activity against your account. In many cases, that also gives Google some very private and personal information about you. It's no exageration to say that they know more about your online habits than you know yourself.
Given that, Google omits in their privacy policy:
- how long they keep your activity data before it is erased. Is it 6 months? 12 months? Forever?
- whether they disassociate your identity from your browsing behaviour or web activity when they look at it (i.e is the data anonymised before Google's staff view it?)
- related to the above: who sees your data inside Google? Their Privacy Policy simply states "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations." This is too vague in my opinion particularly when you consider the gargantuan volumes of data Google collects about you.
Let me put it another way: if I asked you for your name, DOB, mobile number and location and then recorded your online activity against that information, wouldn't you expect me to tell you who sees your data, whether that data is anonymised and how long I keep that data about you?
Google's privacy policy is not misleading but they omit some of the most important information you would expect to find in a privacy policy.
When you sign up for a Google account you give Google your name, date-of-birth (DOB), location and mobile phone number. This is some of your most private and personal details. If you're signed in to your Google account while you browse the web or use your Android phone (or you use the track-everything-you-do Chrome OS), then Google records your browing habits and activity against your account. In many cases, that also gives Google some very private and personal information about you. It's no exageration to say that they know more about your online habits than you know yourself.
Given that, Google omits in their privacy policy:
- how long they keep your activity data before it is erased. Is it 6 months? 12 months? Forever?
- whether they disassociate your identity from your browsing behaviour or web activity when they look at it (i.e is the data anonymised before Google's staff view it?)
- related to the above: who sees your data inside Google? Their Privacy Policy simply states "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations." This is too vague in my opinion particularly when you consider the gargantuan volumes of data Google collects about you.
Let me put it another way: if I asked you for your name, DOB, mobile number and location and then recorded your online activity against that information, wouldn't you expect me to tell you who sees your data, whether that data is anonymised and how long I keep that data about you?