As of Thursday, March 1, Google consolidated over 60 privacy policies into one, eliminating many of the privacies users had.

The new policy gives Google information about all of the accounts they run, such as email, YouTube and search history.

The company now also has access to information on the services and actions one takes on their phone when they use Google or Android Market.

Information about what one searches for, who emails are sent to and even one’s location is now gathered by the company, unless users change their settings.

Because of Google’s ability to access email content, this poses the potential risk of addresses, phone numbers and other information being released to third parties.

“I feel like the new policy invades my privacy. I don’t like the idea of Google playing Big Brother when it comes to my Internet usage,” said Annie Park, a sophomore pre-pharmacy major from New Orleans.

Nowhere on the web is completely safe. Data is collected from all websites in the form of cookies, but Google is being scrutinized for the collection of private data. The company says they are doing this to make users’ searches more personalized and include more appealing ads. Their goal is to better the experience for the user.

“I think it’s pretty ironic that they call it a privacy policy when in fact it does not provide any privacy with all the tracking they’re doing,” said Michael Hankins, a senior psychology major from West Monroe.

Users have the option of letting Google collect any information they want, limiting what is collected or eliminating the collection of data all together.

To change the settings, users need to log in to their Google account, click the drop down menu next to the account’s name and select “Account Settings.” Then, the user needs to scroll down the page and select “Web History” underneath “Services.” Here, users can clear certain history or all of the history and also disable the saving of search history.