Google has increasingly worked to more tightly integrate data across its popular services to create fuller portraits of its users for targeted advertising. Consumers, meanwhile, have scrambled to keep up with privacy policy changes on Google and Facebook, public interest groups and privacy advocates say.
The change in the Web giant’s terms of service will begin Nov. 11, and Google said that users can opt out of the new feature. But the shift in policy opened fresh privacy concerns as Google joins Facebook in posting data about its users across the Web in what are called “shared endorsements.”
That means, for example, that a Google+ user’s name, picture and comments endorsing a particular automobile might appear in an online car ad.