Opting out of Google’s new privacy policy and data collection is really not that difficult: http://grownupgeek.com/opt-out-googles-privacy-policy

“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”

“Google doesn’t understand people,” he said. “Have you ever spoken to a Google support person on the phone? They don’t have them. Sure, they’ll direct you to their blogs — where you’ll be lucky if you can find the answer you’re looking for — or they’ll let you give feedback. But do they ever give you feedback on your feedback?”

Ouch – and oh so true.

You can read the entire article here: Google sells people

(Read to the tune of Video Killed The Radio Star)
I can remember, a long time ago, way back in my early days of webmastering and SEOing circa 2006, many blogging and SEO ‘experts’ were predicting that the end of SEO as we knew it would soon be upon us. They pointed to many of the changes that Google was beginning to make for determining search-ranking results such as personal web-browsing habits, bounce-rate, time spent on-page, etc – metrics that were not easily controlled or gamed by webmasters.

Fast-forward to 2011: Google now has Chrome, Google+, Android, near-full saturation of websites using Analytics, and a variety of services, websites, and systems all with the ability to do one very important thing: Collect user data and browsing habits.

It now looks like with Google’s Panda updates beginning earlier this year, the search engine giant is beginning to leverage all of that data to rank websites more on this new data than on the traditional metrics such as inbound links and keyword saturation that spammers “SEO Experts” have been using to game Google search results for years.

ZDNET’s Tom Foremski wrote an article this week underscoring the apparent fact that effectively, Google has killed SEO. In the article, he points out a few items about our new non-SEO reality:

- If you are negatively affected by Google’s new search rankings, no matter what you do (based on ‘old style’ SEO), you probably will not be able to regain your previous search engine ranking

- The seemingly random elements of Google’s recent updates could be a way to prevent webmasters from putting their heads together to reverse-engineer the changes (Google is smarter than we are)

- Blogger.com (owned by Google) has been unaffected by the recent changes. Perhaps Google is protecting their own interest – or, maybe they are saving the spammer-haven for last.

What does all this mean to you?

Hopefully it means that as the owner of a quality, original, content-rich website, you will now be able to reap the rewards of all the new traffic coming your way and will no longer have to worry about “SEO”.

Or..

If you are the owner of shitty, copycat, spammy, worthless websites, it’s time to quit being a lazy slacker and go start your new career at McDonald’s.

Jwz.com on the Google Plus real-names policy clusterfuck.

There are some very good cases for using pseudonyms while interacting in the online world to protect one’s basic privacy. Google just can’t win this battle of trying to require the use of real names. It’s like trying to force people to watch black and white episodes of I Love Lucy on every new 3D HDTV – it’s just not natural.

.. Go to any site where people can create accounts just by entering a fake email address, and where there are no valuable relationships between users to maintain, and you’ll find a mosh pit of spam and just plain garbage. Fortunately, nobody is asking for anonymous speech on Google+; we’re asking for the ability to use pseudonyms—persistent names that aren’t tied to our real life address, home and personal information. All the usual validation processes (SMS messages, voice activation on the phone, etc.) would apply to them. When people give examples of how pseudonyms create hostile environments, they are almost always referring to comment systems, not social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, or Google+.

That ^ FTW…