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1. No matter how hard it tries, it seems Google can't help
frightening people. Even its famous "Don't be evil" policy
might scare someone who believes the company's power
or its profits are somehow nefarious.

2. It may be Google's business model, rather than anything
about the company itself, that gives the public the willies.
Google is the undisputed champion at what the MBAs call
"monetizing content:" selling advertising to accompany
pictures or words. But the content Google monetizes is
not, for the most part, its own; it is the stuff other people
create and put on the internet. This is not news to anyone,
nor is it unique to Google. Yet Google's scale and scope
when combined with its way of making money, which can
feel like the exploitation of someone else's efforts, don't
engender a lot of trust, regardless of the purity of the
company's motives.

3. A lot of people worked themselves into a lather over new
privacy rules that Google rolled out at the beginning of
this month. The new policy collapsed all Google services
into one, overarching privacy statement. (Google Books,
Chrome and Wallet, while consistent with this policy, will
maintain additional, separate policies, linked at the
bottom of the webpage.) Grouping its products together
will offer a more seamless and useful experience for users,
according to Google. It will also mean more effective
targeting for advertisers.

4. Some find it unnerving that Google will now group a user's
search history with his YouTube viewing habits, or connect
her interests on Google + to the material she looks at on
Google Maps. Responses in the days before the
changeover ranged from the reasonable to the slightly
panicked.

5. The widespread jumpiness seems somewhat contrary,
considering that many of the people complaining freely
share their comments, activities, interests and photos with
a broad circle of friends and acquaintances via social
networking.

6. Google tried to avoid repeating missteps that it and other
companies, including Facebook, have made in the past.
Google took pains to make the policy changes, and the
implementation timeline, very clear. Should you choose to
discontinue any or all of its services, Google itself will
point you to The Data Liberation Front, which will help you
migrate data out of (as well as into) various Google
products. After the debacle of Google Buzz, Google has
every reason to want to rebuild user trust.

7. But that goal may be harder to reach for Google than for
other businesses. Many users' doubts may be
subconscious, but they have reason to wonder whether
Google, which exploits commercial content to make its
money, wants to exploit private data in a similar way.

8. Yet we put aside those concerns for commercial reasons,
as well as for private ones. This column, like all the
content on my firm's website, will be indexed by Google,
and may be picked up by the Google News service. Google
will sell ads to accompany my work. I won't get paid
directly for writing this opus, but Google very well may
make a little money off my efforts.

9. I enter into this transaction willingly. I want Google to
distribute my work because I want to expand my circle of
contacts and to stay in touch with those who already
know me. Colleagues, friends, clients, strangers - if they
think what I have to say is worth knowing, Google will
help them find it. That's my indirect reward.

10. Personal Google users make the same bargain. We let
Google sell targeted ads to accompany our searches,
videos and maps, in part because we value the service
Google provides, and in part because those ads
themselves often give us valuable information. If nobody
ever responded to ads on Google, the company would
have gone out of business long ago. When I say that
Google's business model gives people a mild sense of the
creeps, I don't mean that the model is intrinsically creepy -
though it certainly has been disruptive to all sorts of
media companies whose business is to monetize their own
content.

11. If you were already comfortable with Google tracking your
search history so it could facilitate your future searches,
show you advertisements of potential interest, or just
because the idea of Google tracking your search history
didn't bother you, then I doubt you have much reason to
care whether Google similarly uses that search history to
locate maps or YouTube videos you might want to see.

12. Some might even welcome the change. Such tracking
capabilities can be time savers and life enhancers. Netflix,
for example, keeps track of the films and TV shows I
watch, and asks me to tell it which ones I particularly
liked. As a result, Netflix has been able to recommend
many titles that I have enjoyed, and which I would never
have found on my own.

13. By all means, if you don't want Google tracking your
activities, turn that feature off. (Though Google will always
track you to some degree, there are a variety of was to
disconnect that tracking from your online identity.)
However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's advice that
everyone turn off such tracking seems overwrought and
pointless. Most people just don't care, nor do they have
any reason to care, about whether Google collates the
information it already gathers. These users may even
actively choose to keep their tracking enabled, in order to
reap the fullest benefits of Google's technology.

14. Internet users widely seem to be growing savvier about
who they share with and how. A recent study from the
Pew Center's Internet and American Life Project suggests
that users are paying closer attention to who they friend,
and making more of their social media use private to
those friends that remain. (1) Educating yourself about
who can see information about you online and how is all
to the good.

15. Of course, if you routinely sign into a Google account, my
guess is that you probably do so because you are a Gmail
user. Think of all the private, personal information that is
contained in the text of your emails, which you willingly
let Google hold and store for you. If you trust Google with
that much of your life already, adding your YouTube habits
is probably not that big of a deal. If you trust Google to
use your data only in the ways it says it will, then whether
it keeps that data scattered across services or condensed
in one place won't have a big impact in the long run.

16. Source:1) The Washington Post, "Users getting smarter
about online privacy"

17. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQ8Ut5r1AQ/