It’s not long ago that Google was described as “the evil empire” because of its perceived intent on hoovering up all the data it could about us in the endeavour to “provide the best search experience for its users”. Baloney of course – they just wanted to drive the monetisation of their platform as far as they thought they could get away with, and by now you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the search results that appear at the top of a Google search – they’ve almost always been “paid-for”.
However, out of bad publicity they learned a lesson. When changing terms and conditions of use, or service, its best to explain clearly, and in advance, what they want, and expect, to do, and invite comment. That was most certainly missing from Facebook’s recent debacle with WhatsApp. So to show how it perhaps should be done, I’me including some recent screen shots from Google over the past few months …
A very recent change to Google services that is being proposed and communicated to users in an email. This was the first email sent …
… which was followed up with this one, which prompted me to do something about it!!!
Once into the application, you receive a screen like this one …
I’ve now switched off these personalisations, but what I was doing was very clearly explained.
Then there is this advance warning of changes to the storage policy that covers your Drive and Photos accounts. [I must do something about this as I have a number of Google accounts knocking about.]
A clear explanation of changes to YouTube – not ones I like, but there’s no attempt to hide what they intend to do, and it provides a hint that they will apply to us later this year when Google leave Ireland for the US.
Changes to the Google Photos policy which is causing some distress, but is explained clearly and gives you a lot of time to work out how to use the service after June 1st 2021.
Early notice of the intended changes to Google Drive, and how files will be deleted.
Finally, another company explains clearly how and why it’s changing it’s Terms and Conditions – not something WhatsApp did. Shame on them!
