I’m sure you’ve already heard, but the Android Market has been rebranded as Google Play. Google Play is the reincarnation of the Android Market, which has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few months, as first music and then books and movies have been added. My only hesitation when the Market became Google Play on my phone was having to agree to the privacy policy once again, which, of course, is the new comprehensive Google privacy policy covering all properties and all accounts. If you think about it, shouldn’t it be called the Google sharing policy instead of privacy policy, since you are basically giving Google permission to share your information across every relationship that you have with them?
Delete Your Google Search History Before It Becomes a Permanent Record
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released clear instructions and a compelling argument for deleting your Google search history before the new, comprehensive Google Privacy Policy goes into effect on March 1, 2012. The concern with the new, unified privacy policy is that your web search history will be combined with your data on YouTube, Google Plus, Gmail, Google Docs and all other Google properties, as well as saving it as a permanent history. Removing your search history won’t stop Google from using your data for internal purposes, but it will keep different Google properties from using your search history for marketing and customization purposes.
The instructions are simple. When logged in to your Google account, go to http://www.google.com/history and click the “remove all history” button, confirming it on the next page. That’s it. That will remove your search history and keep your history from being recorded in the future. It is also important that you do this for all of your Google accounts and for some of us, that might quite a task.
Pinterest IS Making Money… …Off of YOU!
I’ve been watching Pinterest with fascination because of the massive appeal it has for certain demographics. It’s really clever because it is a graphical bookmarking site billed a social online pinboard that allows you to “organize and share the things you love.” Everyone expects that a popular site like Pinterest should be making money, but noticeably absent from the interface are any advertising blocks or any other promotional spaces.
It makes sense, though considering the findings posted on Digital Trends that Pinterest is converting shared links on the site to affiliate links. This is not surprising, as it seems one of the most logical ways to convert the user-generated content on the site into monetizable traffic. However, the interesting thing is that they don’t disclose anywhere on their site or their blog that they are modifying the links that members are “pinning” to their “boards”. Looking through their terms, copyright notice and privacy policy, the standard items are in place, but nothing about modifying the content uploaded to the site to generate income via affiliate relationships. What I’m curious about is how this fits into the FTC guidelines for disclosing affiliate relationships. Maybe it only applies to bloggers and only applies to those who blog about items provided via affiliate relationships.