ibid.

This is not the post I had planned to make... (Not to worry; you will have a chance to read that particular rant in the near future.) Events since my last post about Service Y insisting that I needed to be "social" and share what I thought was a semi-private matter with the entire online world have instilled a need to further discuss the issue.

Once upon a time (two or three lifetimes ago, it seems) one of my colleagues at an IT firm referred to Microsoft as "the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room" when we were discussing some of their business tactics.  Fast-forward to the current time, just days after my above-referenced complaint, and we suddenly find another online entity acting in an excruciatingly annoying manner. The difference is that this entity is so much larger than "Service Y" and many of their competitors that their role is that of an 800 TON gorilla in the corner of the room.

You see, dear reader, this company -- I will call them "Service G" -- actually runs/owns/controls many online services that once were independent companies. The services offered by these other, smaller entities under their own names overlap only slightly, so there was very little internecine conflict (at least in the public eye). There was, however, one complication: having once been separate, independent companies, each of these services had its own separate, independent privacy policy.

For the management of a large company, maintaining & enforcing separate privacy policies for every service offered by the company is akin to tap dancing in a minefield; no matter how well one dances, there will eventually be an explosion.  In an effort to avoid such problems, Service G's management developed a single comprehensive privacy policy for all the entities under their umbrella. Even better, they decided to take advantage of all these different entities being tied together and have changed the way they share user data to provide a more uniform, personally tailored experience for their users.

Unfortunately, they have defined the latter entirely in their (and their advertisers') favor... and have done so in a way that places important limits on how anyone can use any of Service G's offered services & products. Yes, it is indeed convenient to be able to access multiple blogs, view videos online, go shopping, do online searches, read email, find addresses on a map, have foreign language documents translated, and do many (many!) other things online with just a single login while one's preferences are remembered from site to site. However, if someone has been using different logins on purpose -- for example, to separate personal activities from business activities, or to have a more restrictive access for one's underage children than for one's adult self -- this universal approach of linking everything to a single email address and/or login identity essentially makes it impossible to continue doing so.

There is nothing stopping users from re-establishing separate online identities... except the need to find a way to create yet another email account... which is then linked to one's original identity... which Service G then references and links back to one's original online identity, thus negating the action.  They insist they are not collecting any user data that was not already being collected, and I freely admit they have made it easier to see (most of) that data than most of their competitors -- but now the data being shared with advertisers is ALL of it, from EVERY service, and there is no way to opt out of sharing the data. (As an aside, there is nothing intrinsically illegal about this universal practice; data about your activities online is property of the providers of the services you are using, it is NOT your property. I will reserve related comments for another post, I just present it as a pertinent fact.)

If Service G was a smaller company, the problem would be somewhat less annoying and the practice a lot less dangerous to users' privacy... but Service G is a massive multi-headed chimera whose ubiquitous services are almost unavoidable, and there is nary a pegasus in sight. The result is that I -- and you! -- now have to decide between trying to find a company not affiliated with Service G for each of the services they provide (remember, with one exception all these services became well-known as independent companies that were later acquired by Service G after making a name for themselves) or allow a massive and growing library of information about where I go both online and in the real world to be sold to advertisers and (separately but simultaneously) be used to shape how these many services present themselves to me according to Service G's interpretation regardless of what I may actually want.

Annoying, isn't it?

Stay tuned...