Google Defends New Privacy Policy to Congress

(NewsCore) - Changes that Google Inc. made to its privacy policy last week bring it more in line with rivals Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Inc. and Apple Inc., the company said Tuesday in response to questions from members of Congress.

The internet search giant, which has expanded into social networking, mobile-device software and other services that collect voluminous data about people's online behavior, faced questions last week after updating its policies on how it treats the data it collects about hundreds of millions of people world-wide.

Google said the changes could improve people's experience using some of its services. But the company has also indicated to outsiders that the changes may help boost its online-advertising business, which generated nearly $40 billion in revenue last year.

Google said that it isn't collecting new kinds of information about people and that the policy essentially consolidates dozens of policies that were already in effect for individual Google services. But it added that if users are signed into their Google accounts, data about their web-search history and the videos they watched on YouTube may now be used in combination with other services.

Google said that if a user is "signed in and searching Google for cooking recipes, our current privacy policies wouldn't let us recommend cooking videos when she visits YouTube based on her searches -- even though she was signed into the same Google account when using both Google search and YouTube."

The company said such changes "benefit our signed-in users by making things easier and letting them find useful information more quickly."

The new policy, which will take effect March 1, also allows Google to show better-targeted online ads to people because it can take into account the videos they watched or their previous searches. Google's sales representatives have already notified advertising agencies about the new ad-targeting capabilities, people familiar with the matter said.

A Google spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.