March 01, 2012

How much privacy do you have online?

For families, the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s where we do the majority of the research for our adoption processes, it’s where we input our most private information, it’s a place we try to shield our children from. This is an adoption blog, but changes in privacy policies on the Internet affect ALL families. Maybe your job doesn’t have great maternity leave policies for adoptees. Maybe you don’t even want people to know you’re thinking about adoption. Starting tomorrow, Google is changing its privacy policy, making your information available to ALL Google products.

Here’s a little bit of information about the change:

“On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.”

You start here, by going to https://www.google.com/history, and then you can follow the rest of the instructions on this page at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Clear your Google history, keep your family safe and your privacy in tact!