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“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media chief executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out — especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.”

Opt-out? Is there no way to do that?

Nope. That’s a common refrain among critics of the change, that there is no way to opt-out of it. Not that it’s really clear what exactly one would be opt-out of. Organizations such as Google update their privacy policies all of the time, and it’s unclear what exactly would be the alternative.

Of course, you are still able to opt-out in the way that matters most. You can stop using Google products.

Didn’t Google do most of this stuff already?

Yes. For the most part the new privacy policy just streamlines the process. From PCWorld:

Some of what Google is describing has already been in place for some time. When you sign-in to Gmail, for example, Google automatically signs you into Calendar, Docs and search on that same account. YouTube, until only recently, was treated as a separate account. Google has also been using automated tools to scan the text of your e-mails to serve you what it thinks will be relevant ads (but are often anything but). The biggest difference is that now Google will collate all that data so that it can serve you ads, improve your search results and surface your own data when you need it.

Doesn’t Facebook do this, but way more?

Sort of. When you’re logged into your Facebook account it tracks all sorts of data about you which gets fed back to Facebook and your Facebook apps to use. With Google, the only things tracked are what happens when you’re on Google sites.

Of course, Facebook does not have a policy to not be evil, like Google does.

I want to stop using Google products but my calender, address book and all of my information are tied up there! How do I escape?

Google has a “data liberation” policy that allows you to pull all of your information out of the site to use as you see fit. (Facebook also adopted a similar policy last year).

When does this kick in?

March 1.

Where can I read more?

Google has a series of pages on the new policy here.

Google explains the privacy policy in a video below