Google, Facebook And Your Privacy

We're talking about Google and Facebook and your privacy. The rules are changing. They say it's great for you - but is it?

You’d better believe Google tracks you.  Facebook tracks you.  To better serve, they say.  To better sell ads, we know.  But right now the tracking and slicing and dicing and x-raying of your online life – our lives, in so many ways these days – is moving to a whole new level.

Google’s new privacy policy – which you can accept, or decline and be banished – sews together all your info across every Google property – Gmail, YouTube, Android, on and on – and tracks it all.  Facebook’s Timeline tracks you from birth.

Privacy?  Well, what’s that?

This hour, On Point:  Google, Facebook, and privacy now.
-Tom Ashbrook

Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired magazine and author of In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the Interactive Program at the City University of New York School of Journalism. His blog is “Buzzmachine.” He is also the author of What Would Google Do?

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and teaches Information Privacy Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Wired "Under the banner “One policy, one Google experience,” the company’s new Policies site says that it is “getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read."

CBS News "Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg faces new challenges as his company prepares to file for its initial public offering this week. If the tagline for the film "The Social Network" was "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies," the sequel's might be "You don't get to 10 billion valuation without risking 800 million friends.""

This video, produced by Google, explains the company's new privacy policy changes.

This video, produced by Facebook, explains the company's new Timeline feature on its social network.

This video from the EPIC explains how search and advertising companies store and utilize your online data.