Tag Archives: privacy policy

We value your privacy now, but maybe not later

Everybody knows these modal dialogs when visiting a website for the first time that ask you to accept cookies and consent to being tracked by third-party advertising networks. It actually became a habit for me to always click through these things and reject any kind of tracking or use of my personal information except for the “required” cookies.

But today, I came across this dialog on atlasobscura.com with the title We value your privacy:

I highly doubt Atlas Obscura actually values my privacy when the only option is to “accept”. By the way, if you actually follow to the privacy policy to “withdraw consent”, access to the content is still blocked by this modal dialog on the next visit. Leaving technical details aside, for the layperson there is in fact no other choice than clicking “accept”, if they want to get access to the website.

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Google’s Privacy Policy over the Years

Google’s Privacy Policy is going to change this March in order to unify up to 60 different policies across all the services Google has to offer. While reading through the new terms, I compared what did change exactly to see if the coverage in other blogs and media is correct.

As older versions are still available, I noticed that the beginning of this Privacy Policy has changed over the years. There used to be a first sentence explaining the general approach Google takes towards your data. But read yourself:

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