Key Points:

• Google has recently updated its privacy policy, allowing them to collect your public data.
• Google will do so to train its AI and improve its functionalities.
• Experts now say you must be more careful about your online information.

We all thought that Mark Zuckerberg knew what we do on Facebook and Instagram. This is why we get to see such memes on the internet about Facebook’s hidden data collection policies. But Google recently has taken it a bit further and revealed that they are collecting our publicly available data.

Google has recently revealed that it will be actively collecting all your publicly available data as part of its revised Privacy Policy. They stated that they would do so in order to train their AI programs since AI is based on machine learning, where they learn new functions by collecting data.

Since this public data collection by Google is part of its Privacy Policy, you cannot say no to it. If you do say no to it, you will not be able to use any Google services. Not even Gmail.

This is what Google has stated regarding this change:

Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features, and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

With this change, many experts believe that their publicly available information is under scrutiny. Therefore, whatever you post online, Google will know instantly. And so will its AI. So, be careful from now on. Google knows everything.

Google's updated privacy policy allows the company to scrape public data to improve its AI models. via @MattGSouthern: https://t.co/ZIut7wgzb6#Google #DigitalMarketing

— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) July 3, 2023

However, all is still not lost for you. There are various ways in which you can safeguard all the information about you that is available publicly. 

The first thing that you need to do is change some Google settings. You will find these settings options through your Google account. There are some options regarding “Privacy and Data Collection” that you can opt out of. These include Location History, Web & App Activity, and Voice & Audio Activity.

Next, if you use Google Chrome, you can automatically prevent some information like your search history be collected by Google by browning in Incognito Mode. 

Thirdly, you can opt to use a VPN service. Various VPN services like NordVPN, ExpessVPN, SurfShark, TunnelBear, PureVPN, Hotspot Shield, ProtonVPN, and more can be used to hide lots of personal data like browsing actions and preferences, IP address, location, and more.

However, if you wish to be completely anonymous on the internet, then not using Google can also be a safe bet. You can use other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave Browser, Vimeo, ProtonMail, etc can be handy. All these platforms can be alternatives to Google platforms like Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, and Gmail, respectively.

More Resources:

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• Qwant Review: Is This Search Engine Really Private
• Google Search Console Finally Adds Interaction To Next Paint (INP) To Core Web Vital Report