‘Aviation Forum’ members may have noticed that Google, the owner of YouTube, have changed their privacy policy by combining into one the privacy policies of all their subsidiaries. These changes permit Google to track anybody who uses their sites right across cyberspace which, according to the EU Information Commissioner, is illegal and she is investigating the matter.
Google will only permit users to log-on if they have their privacy setting set to ‘Medium’ at their highest; if the user sets their privacy to ‘High’, which will exclude tracking cookies, they aren’t permitted to log-on. I decided to play a few games with this and set my privacy to medium to log on and then reset to high once I had uploaded a film. Consequential to this YouTube decided to deny me access to my accounts for ‘PenrithBeacon’ and ‘austerfive’ so there won’t be any more films from me on YouTube.
Because of this I thought I might try Vimeo. This company offers an alternative to YouTube which, provided you pay $9.99 a month, is more or less, a little less, the same as YouTube. I read their privacy policy and it seemed to be the same as Google’s; I then did a little test and found that Vimeo won’t even let me register as a paying customer if I have my privacy set to High. The implication here is that Vimeo want your money but also the right to track their paying customers across the web.
Now I value my privacy and therefore I have chosen not to share my videos on the internet any more. My thanks to all who have been kind enough to send me appreciative comments in the past, but from now on, with some regret, my videos will only be seen by me.
Regards
By: Bunsen Honeydew - 7th April 2012 at 10:59
Picasa Web is the same but as it’s run by Google that isn’t surprising.
This does bother me, my job sometimes involves dealing with identity theft and I see this tracking as aiding those who commit it.
As Picasa Web uses facial recognition to track people my little game has been to post photos of friends on picasa web with plausible but obviously ficticious names.
I hope the informaiton cmmissioner comes down against Google but even if she does they won’t stop, just be more covert about it.
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March 26, 2012 at 12:27 pm