"Google users ignore major privacy shakeup"

Only one in ten British Google users have read the firm’s radical new privacy policy despite heavy promotion and controversy over its "invasive" terms, a survey has found.

Google announced its new privacy policy in January 

The new system comes into force on Thursday and will pool personal data from more than 60 Google services into a single file for each of its hundreds of millions of users.

The move has been criticised by privacy campaigners and was described as “troubling for a number of reasons” by a group of state Attorneys General last week, who accused Google of invading consumer privacy. The firm has meanwhile argued it is “making things simpler and we’re trying to be

upfront about it".

For a dry legal document the publicity campaign has been unprecedented, signalling the importance Google places on its data-pooling project. It has emailed every account holder and prominently displayed a link to the new policy on its homepage for weeks. The approach has attracted praise from European officials who want privacy policies to be simpler and more accessible.

The repeated prompts and controversy have seemingly failed to generate much interest among British users, however. According to survey by YouGov for Big Brother Watch only 12 per cent have bothered to review the new document.

Some 47 per cent said they did not even know any changes were in the works.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, should delay Google’s privacy overhaul and mount an investigation.

“The impact of Google’s new policy cannot be understated, but the public are in the dark about what the changes actually mean,” he said.

“If people don’t understand what is happening to their personal information, how can they make an informed choice about using a service?

“Google is putting advertiser’s interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean.”

Comparable data on the proportion of users who read Facebook’s frequently-rewritten privacy policy, for example, were not available.

Google said its new policy would help users with concerns find answere quickly.

"We’ve undertaken the most extensive notification effort in Google’s history, informing every Google account holder, flagging the new policy on every Google product site and publishing a link on our home page," it said.

"Big Brother Watch fails to recognize that whereas large companies update their privacy policies on a regular basis, they rarely take the time and effort Google has taken to communicate them to their users."

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner said officials were working with their European counterparts to "ensure that these changes, and the manner in which they have been communicated, comply with the requirements of European data protection law". French authorities were speaking to Google on behalf of all European data protection authorities, he said.

"It is nevertheless important that people read the information organisations provide them with before agreeing to any changes related to the processing of their personal information," the Information Commissioner's spokesman added.

The new privacy policy does not mean Google will collect more information about users, but information it gathers via its different web services will be combined for the first time, allowing it to build a more detailed profile of each user.

For instance, data on which YouTube videos a user has watched could be combined with their web search history and Google Maps searches to infer their interests and movements for targeted advertising. The new pools of data will be created for all users with a consumer Google account; companies that use Google Apps will retain control over employees' privacy settings.

Google has emphasised that users can increase their privacy settings before the new policy comes into force. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US civil rights group.