Goggle's New Privacy Settings

It seems that we've been hearing about Google's new settings for quite a long time now, and tomorrow they are set to take effect.

What am I, a lonely sole blogger, to make of all of it?

For starters they sound complicated. To simplify and dilute around 60 privacy settings into a single setting is quite risky and frightening when one considers the possible consequences and unknowns regarding privacy, social interaction, and search key remembrance. I am, however, reading a lot about the lack of change most users will see and feel when they use and reuse Google and it's subsidiaries and products.

And on the positive side, I know many YouTubers would actually be happy if their videos and posts were linked to more videos and were aggregate at an optimal level.

Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be a failure or a dime-a-dozen disappointment like so many other short-lived Internet companies or their poor decisions--like Yahoo's loss of ground to Google over user interfacing and ease of navigation, Groupon and Pandora's quick fade from glory, or Google's Google+ "failure."

The point of my post rests on this thesis: if we, the users, don't like Google's decisions, all we can do is beg and complain for them to revert back because there is no alternative. Think about it: Google has us by a chokehold. We can't defect to a different host, can't abandon Google (after all, Google has moved into our daily lexicon as a synonymous verb for "to search"), and can't change their minds since they have obviously switched to a more streamlined system for multiple reasons, none of which rely upon our immediate satisfaction with their changes.

To Google is to search, but it is also to stare wide-eyed into the Internet, wondering (if there is a problem or a disappointment after their change) if the experience will ever be the same again.