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Google Updates Privacy Policies

　　Google announced that it is updating its privacy policies to make them simpler. They don't appear to have any changes involving CEO Eric Schmidt driving around neighborhoods in an ice cream truck, luckily.

　　Google isn't actually changing any of its privacy practices. It's just trying to make the language more understandable. Google Associate General Counsel Mike Yang outlines the updates:

　　Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.

　　We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.