Has Microsoft Grown a Heart? Could Google Use a Brain?
Will Microsoft’s “Putting People First” ad campaign and blog post slamming Google’s privacy changes give netizens the courage to fight for more privacy? Heart. Brain. Courage. Will these allusions to the Wizard of Oz never end?
Danny Sullivan, a search engine guru, who’s been quoted in media from the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Forbes to the New Yorker and Nightline, has covered Google since the company’s founding. Recently, Sullivan did an exhaustive MarketingLand.com piece on Google’s privacy changes and Microsoft’s reaction.
So, could Google use a brain? Sullivan says, “Last September, Google CEO Larry Page warned Google’s biggest threat was Google itself. His words are ringing true, as Google arch-nemesis Microsoft is seizing on Google’s recent missteps to score some points through a newspaper ad campaign that pitches Microsoft’s products as treating customers better than Google’s do.”
One of the recent missteps, and the one Microsoft landed on hard, was Google’s announcement “that its privacy policy would change, to allow it the right to share data between its various properties in ways that its current set of more than 70 different privacy policies don’t allow.”
What this means to users is that they have to use the same name and password to logon to Gmail and YouTube. It works that way across all Google platforms except for Google Wallet, Chrome and Google Books. These changes offer Google the ability to share data between its properties more easily…which is another way of saying Google can track users better…which is another way of saying Google users are losing more privacy.
Considering privacy has become such a hot topic, was it smart for Google to change its privacy policy – especially now? Sullivan says, “It took only two days for Google to get a letter from members of the U.S. Congress asking for clarification about the new privacy changes. Plenty of headlines painted a negative picture of the move….
“I’ve seen numerous people in the tech press shaking their virtual heads wondering at what’s seemed some very odd moves from Google. I’ve been one of them. That’s made the ground ripe for Microsoft to harvest some potential anti-Google anger.”
So, is Microsoft attempting to take advantage of this potential anti-Google user backlash? Microsoft corporate communications chief Frank X. Shaw sees it this way, “Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of decisions that Google has made that have caused people to pause and think about their relationship with Google. That’s why we decided to run some ads. To say, ‘Hey, we have a different point of view, and you should check out these services. They don’t come with the same set of trade-offs’.”
So is Microsoft running down a competitor for ad bucks or sticking up for “the little guy’s” right to privacy? Has big, bad Microshaft become a gentler, kindlier company, striving to live up to its Wall Street nickname, Mr. Softee? In short, has this one-time bastion of cold technological calculation become a company with a heart?
Here’s a link to the ad so you can decide for yourself.
But, if you don’t want to bother clicking, here’s the ad copy (FYI, the visuals leave a lot to be desired. Or put another way, there are no visuals. So, the copy pretty much says it all.):
“Google is in the process of making some unpopular changes to some of their most popular products. Those changes, cloaked in language like “transparency,” “simplicity” and “consistency,” are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search, send, say or stream while using one of their services.
But, the way they’re doing it is making it harder for you to maintain control of your personal information. Why are they so interested in doing this that they would risk this kind of backlash? One logical reason: Every data point they collect and connect to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser.
To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve the quality of an advertising product. But, that effort needs to be balanced with continuing to meet the needs and interests of users. Every business finds its own balance and attracts users who share those priorities. Google’s new changes have upset that balance, with users’ priorities being de-prioritized. That’s why people are concerned and looking for alternatives.
If these changes rub you the wrong way, please consider using our portfolio of award-winning products and services….
Sullivan takes a balanced view of both companies’ privacy policies, “Whether Microsoft’s various privacy policies give more or less rights than Google’s forthcoming one is quite possibly an impossible task for anyone to properly measure, given how open-ended they all seem to be.”
And Sullivan offers a promise of privacy from both companies. “Even if you could itemize all the rights in the privacy policies, there still remain controls that users have with services at both Google and Microsoft which may prevent information from being logged or shared.”
Ultimately, the issue of privacy rests with the people who demand it – the online users who have the courage to stand up for their rights.
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