Google has announced that after March 1st they will imply changes to the privacy settings to allow data to be shared over all of their platforms. Yet with this announcement there has already a lot of criticism as well as accusations over bypassing safari, and the urgency to stop the privacy policy change. With all of these problems it seems like Google's attempt to better their platforms against their competitors may actually backfire.
As seen in a BBC article from January the author quoted Google's director of privacy, product and engineering Alma Whitten who said, "We're rolling out a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of our products and explains what information we collect and how we use it in a more readable way." She also talked about how this policy would benefit other parts of Google’s functions. Even though this seems like a great way to get a step up against the competition, it seems that the issue that no one can opt out of this new policy posed more criticism.
A major criticism came from a EU group who sent a letter to the search giant to pause their change until they could finish their analysis of the change. The group was quoted to stating that they wanted to, “check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these citizens in a co-ordinated way." The article also proceeded to state the concern to the change, yet Google restated that the policy was just to simplify the policy for all the platforms and connect all the data between them making integration easier.
Lastly in recent news it seems an accusation about Google cookies bypassing Safari's privacy has also risen in the large stir of controversy recently. The claims state that recently advertisers have been able to store their cookies on web pages accessed by Safari users. In the article they quoted Ms. Whetsone saying, "We didn't anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It's important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information." Even with this reassurance Google declined to provide further comment on the issue.
In conclusion with this much controversy over this new policy, it seems that Google may need to return back to the drawing board and tweak it more before releasing a final policy.