Surely google can't be credited with not selling data to advertisers?

No. it's not opt out. it's "how do you want to share it?". Tell me where exactly this "opt-out" is, i would like to know.

No, I don't give permission by using the site. That's blatanly dishonest to say that. They already mention that already.

I understand you wrote the new TOS, but I'm not sure how you are understanding Goog's TOS. It's always opt-in. probably the only opt out i know of is from their search crawler for websites.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/ please read "information we share" section

I am one of the authors of our new policy. Please read that part of their policy carefully:

"We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances apply:"

"We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information."

Sensitive personal information: "This is a particular category of personal information relating to confidential medical facts, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality."

All other personal data can be shared on an opt-out basis if they would like - it doesn't say anything to the contrary about this.

You could read Facebook's policy and make the same comment: "We do not share any of your information with advertisers (unless, of course, you give us permission)."

And, of course, one of the ways you can give them permission may be by using the site. It doesn't explicitly say how you give them permission anywhere on the policy.

On our new Policy, we state the facts simply. We don't sell your data in any case, and the only time we ever give it up is when we are being forced to by law. Big companies use legalese to hide and otherwise obscure facts from you and to grant themselves rights to your data that they shouldn't have.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and if you don't like our policy, don't use our site (as with any site). Whether or not I'm right or not about Google or Facebook's policy and what they intend, I still don't really understand how mentioning whether Google has a similar policy is relevant to the discussion at hand. We decided to write our own policy because we thought it was doing right by our users, and we encourage others to do the same. Our policy was not written to attack Google or any other company specifically and there's nothing in there that should lead you to interpret it that way.

No. it's not opt out. it's "how do you want to share it?". Tell me where exactly this "opt-out" is, i would like to know.

No, I don't give permission by using the site. That's blatanly dishonest to say that. They already mention that already.

I understand you wrote the new TOS, but I'm not sure how you are understanding Goog's TOS. It's always opt-in. probably the only opt out i know of is from their search crawler for websites.

Sorry for saying so, but this seems like a weird axe to grind. I think your initial comment got downvoted because it seemed sort of like a backhanded criticism; but now it seems sort of like you just wanted to show that you'd read Google's TOS. I am still not sure what Google's TOS has to do with EveryMe's TOS.

Either way, "opt-in" or "opt-out" is in this case a technical distinction. EveryMe's sharing of data isn't opt-anything. They don't do it. Period. Doesn't that constitute a difference?

i would say it's a difference, but opt-in is always a good way to go. I always (atleast, i think so) I make most optins consciously).

I would say everyme has a good TOS/Priv Stmt, compared to google, if it says "this privacy policy stands forever, and will not be changed". I know you can't promise that, and I will not ask you to, but that's only case where I would have more trust for keeping the data with you compared to google's. Or I would trust goog's policies better it addresses the legal aspect of it, while being humanly readable and understandable.

The only thing that differentiates you (as in everyme, most references are same)and goog is they have to cover base for billions of people they are handling.

Even if it's snarky (though I didn't make it so), why would someone downvote it rather than disagree with a comment (HN guidelines please). Please downvote if it doesn't add to discussion. What we had above is discussion.

if you don't agree, reply. don't downvote

Well - you made a blunt statement that seems at the very least unintuitive without backing it up at all. The part of this policy that sticks out at me in this regard is this:

>> We do not sell your data to advertisers or any third parties under any condition. We don't make any tools that let advertisers access or sell ads on your data. We don't track you. The only stats we track are aggregated usage data across the site, and we only use this information for our own purposes.

Doesn't Google "let advertisers... sell ads on your data"? Doesn't Google track you? Honestly, this seems very different from Google.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/ read "information we share" section. google takes advertisers money to match, "not sell", the ads on your data.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ read "Your Content in our Services" about who owns the data.

Google does have a very good TOS, protecting itself and also the users. The problem is no one has ever read their TOS properly. If you want to understand the TOS you have to read it in whole, and not just selected statements. I didn't have to back it up because anyone can read google's TOS because it is obvious in the face when it read it. Does that answer why I wrote what i wrote.

The reason I wrote that is because I have read their TOS, esp. since 50% of my digital life is in google mail and I had to be careful when I made that choice. I make choice not based on who's using "plain language/easy to read", but who's covering the most bases.

TOS and Privacy Policy are not the same thing. Terms of Service' state what rules the user must follow on the service. Privacy Policies state what rules the company will follow with regards to user data.

their TOS refers to privacy policy. dont' read things in isolations and without context.