FAQ: Google’s new privacy policy

Google announced Tuesday that it will integrate users’ information across Gmail, YouTube, search and 57 other Google services. Google privacy director Alma Whitten, who explained the changes in a company blog post Tuesday afternoon, said the company will “treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

What is Google doing?: In a nutshell, Google is taking information from almost all of your Google services — including Gmail, Picasa, YouTube and search — and integrating the data so that they can learn more about you. Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome will retain their own additional policies, partly for legal reasons, but Google could still integrate data from these services.

What kind of information are they collecting and integrating?: Google collects and can integrate almost anything that’s already in the Google ecosystem: calendar appointments, location data, search preferences, contacts, personal habits based on Gmail chatter, device information and search queries, to name a few.

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