CREDIT: CANDIS BROSS
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A colleague once asked Jacquelyn Burkell if she had an account on Google Docs. She did, but being a researcher who focuses on users and information, she made sure Google had no information that could identify her.

Oh, wait, the colleague said before she got a chance to respond. I found it.

“I thought, ‘How the heck does that happen?’” the associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University said. “[The email address’s] got nothing to do with my name.”

It turned out Burkell had unknowingly agreed that Google share information about her across its services – Gmail, Search, Maps, YouTube, Android and others. By doing that, the company was able to identify her.

It’s not that she didn’t want people to know her Gmail account. It’s that she didn’t want Google to know who she was. It’s that she didn’t want Google – and other online companies, like Amazon and Facebook – tracking her every online move.

Facebook changed and redesigned its privacy policies, and it introduced Privacy Basics on January 1, making it easier for users to know what the company does with the information it collects about them.

Privacy Basics teaches users about what others see about them, such as their posts and profile; how others interact with them, such as tagging, comments and likes; and what users see, such as ads. It can be accessed at facebook.com/about/ basics.

Facebook also redesigned its privacy policy page, making it more accessible to users. But is it really a step in the right direction?

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” said David Christopher of Open Media, a Canadian advocacy organization that promotes transparent privacy policies on the web.

But he says making privacy policies more accessible shouldn’t be the end goal – Facebook needs to change its privacy policies in terms of how they collect, use and sell private information to marketers.

“It’s good to see Facebook being more transparent, but at the same time, I think [its] got a lot more to do if they’re really going to reassure people that their privacy will be protected,” Christopher said.

He says the social network needs to strike a better balance between safeguarding the privacy of their users and monetizing its service.

Websites like Google and Facebook track their users across the web using cookies, which are data that websites store on their users’ browsers.

A lot of the services we use online are “free,” Burkell said.

“In reality, what we’re doing is trading valuable personal information in order to get access to these services,” she said.

For Burkell, Facebook’s privacy policy is still problematic. She says privacy policies are written so that people can’t understand them. What Facebook is doing – making its privacy policy more accessible – is a step in the right direction, but the information it is supposed to be disclosing itself is still not understandable.

“I was noticing on the splash page for that policy, it says, ‘As you review our policy, keep in mind that it applies to all Facebook brands, products and services that do not have a separate privacy policy or that link to this policy, which we call the ‘Facebook Services’ or ‘Services,’” she said.

But what are those services? When asked whether the privacy policy covered the popular mobile application Instagram, which Facebook purchased in 2012, she couldn’t find the answer.

The only thing that’s clear, she says, is that Facebook owns Instagram and that there’s a relationship between the two. She says the relationship probably involves sharing data between the two services, but that’s not clear.

“It’s a massive amount of information when you look at it,” she said. “Right now, you’ve asked a question that certainly, while we’re on the phone, I’m not going to be able to answer.”