What changes on Google's new privacy policy? A quick guide

Google’s all new, much talked about privacy policy comes into effect on Thursday. Sure, we’ve all seen the Google banner that says “We’re changing our privacy, this stuff is important”, on Google search, YouTube, Gmail and all the other Google services we use as a matter of course everyday. But how many of us have actually clicked on it? And even if you did click on it, did you sift through the legal jargon and really read it? If you want to give it one more shot, you can do that here .

However if you would rather have someone else tell you what is happening, this post is for you! Here, in a nutshell is what has changed with Google:

* Google is combining more than 60 different privacy policies so it will be able to throw all the data it gathers about each of its logged-in users into personal dossiers, building in essence, personal portraits of its users.

* The new policy does not allow Google to collect more information about its users, though can now do more with the information it has already been collecting across its services - it can create richer profiles of users, using information gathered from search history, videos they may have viewed, blogs they have read and so on. This will help the company deliver more targeted advertising to its users. The concern of course, is that now other search engines and tech companies will start trying to gather similar information on users in far more aggressive ways.

* Some Google services like the search engine Chrome and Google Wallet will not be included in the new privacy policy and will maintain stand-alone policies.

* You cannot opt out of the new policy, but you can control how much Google can see about you, by adjusting the privacy settings in Google’s dashboard . However you will need to have a Google account to sign in and access your data.( Read more on how you can hide your web history from Google here )

* Google will still be able to track what you are doing even if you are not signed into a Google account. But rather than name, it will track you by a code string attached to your browser.

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