If you’ve been watching this site or just reading up on any sort of tech news lately, you’ve no doubt noticed that Google and Facebook are in an eternal struggle for control of the internet. They’ve been rapidly updating their site designs as well as their policies in order to out do each other, but these updates keep coming at the cost of the user’s privacy. Today, Google just flat out sent all of their users an email letting them know that the privacy policy has been changed.

They’re presenting this policy as a streamlined way to protect people. For the last few years, Google has been acquiring several different properties and bringing them into the Google fleet. It started with YouTube and Picasa and has since moved on to internal development projects such as Google Music among others.

So now they’re streamlining the privacy policies of all of these sites into 1 policy. Sound great, right? It would be, except for what happens if you read between the lines. Here’s the most worrying quote to me, directly from the email that they sent all of their users:

If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.

The subtext of this quote is that if you’re a child looking for the animal jaguar or the color pink, they can better guess your age and advertise to you properly, vs if you are an adult who might want to buy a Jaguar car or buy music from the artist Pink (and of course advertise to you properly). They will make these guesses by reading your emails, monitoring your G+ likes and your YouTube upvotes, and making assumptions based on your past Google searches and what content your G+ friends have uploaded. It’s all in the name of them making more money (for now) because you’re more likely to click on an advertisement if they can get this kind of stuff correct.

If you search “Jaguar” and you’re looking for the animal, then the car dealer is wasting their money if you click on the ad. You won’t be buying a Jaguar any time soon, but it costs Jaguar the company money to keep tossing ad revenue at Google when they won’t be seeing returns based on the fact that they picked a dumb name for their car company. Actually, Jaguar is a badass name for a car company, but it’s not search engine friendly, until now.

What’s happening here is Google has converted itself from a user-friendly place into the world’s biggest market research company. They’re tracking trends and delivering that information directly to advertisers. Everything you do with Google has been logged and categorized and is immediately being resold to you. Big Brother is watching everything you do. “1984, yeah right man, that’s a typo. Orwell’s here and now, he’s living large.”

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