New Google Privacy Policy -- Your cancer status is now public.

Maybe others have known about this for a long time; if this is general knowledge forgive my concern.

Recently, Google announced a change to its privacy policy which enables them to share user information across different google services.

Tonight I logged into google on a computer I don't usually use. The google page that appears is the one called "iGoogle" which has personalized news and other headlines, based on what google knows about you. (On my home computer I just use the plain vanilla google "classic" interface which has the search window only.)

Anyhow, imagine my surprise when the custom news headlines on the iGoogle home page were completely filled with prostate cancer articles! Even though I had never set up an alert along those lines. Imagine if I had allowed a coworker to search for something on my computer, and now the whole office gossip circuit knows of my medical status.

This could have come about solely through my searching, if google is analyzing what I search for and tailoring news accordingly. However it could also have come inadvertently through HealingWell. HealingWell runs ads on this forum and elsewhere in this site. I believe the ads come from google, since I notice that different and more targeted ads show when I am logged into my gmail account than when I am not. (please try it yourself and report what you observe.) So if you are logged into google, and reading this page then google knows that it is you who is reading extensively about prostate cancer, even if you don't click on the ads. I can't say for sure the information comes from HealingWell, but now that Google has decided to integrate the information from all their services, this is a distinct possibility.

I bring this up not to bash HealingWell since this is a terrific site and I support the right of its owners to make money. I just would like urge all you readers to be aware of what Google is doing and how it might influence your medical privacy, regardless of how Google collects the information. In addition I hope that the great folks who run this site could take a look at Google's new privacy policies and what that might mean for us users.

I could be all wet on this; I hope I am.

I don't know all the mechanisms to elaborate how it works, but I can assure you, Google is not the only one doing this. Facebook has publically acknowledged that they have tracking cookies running on your computer watching all the websites you are looking at and storing everything they receive. As long as a web page is open to Facebook, all other web pages you browse are seen by their tracking cookie. Google and others are likely doing the same thing. It's not HW, it's any website you visit that is seen. And of course every Google search you've made while logged into a Google account which enables them to associate that search with a known account.

Since reading that from Facebook, I stopped leaving a web page open to Facebook. I check it then close the tab.

In January Google announced Search Plus Your World where search results presented to you include not only the standard stuff but anything you have done that may be relevent to that search topic. For example if you search 'Prostate Cancer' and are a gmail user and included 'Prostate Cancer' in an email to a friend, that e-mail will come up in the search results too. Supposedly all the personal search hits are only shown to you. If someone else searches 'Prostate Cancer' and your name, they would not get the same results as you as your personal content is not included in their search. All this so they say.

Hate to say it, but welcome to the world of web. It's all fine for some, and majorly creepy for others. You have to decide what it means to you and how much of the free world of the web you want to engage in.