• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 25, 2012

Google and Yahoo issued separate announcements about visitor data and the plans for use at each respective company.

Google said it will revise its privacy policies and terms of service, effective March 1, making them shorter and easier to understand.  The new privacy policy makes it clear that Google can use information shared on one service in other Google services.

"If you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," explains Alma Whitten, director of privacy, product and engineering at Google. "In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."

Today, Google has about 70 documents governing policies, but the company will introduce a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of its products and explains the information it collects and how it intends to use it.

Users will start receiving an email to alert them of the changes, according to Whitten, who wrote in a blog post that the company had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, but intends to consolidate more than 60 into one main Privacy Policy.

Data owned by search companies and publishers has become the big ticket for ad targeting and support.

During the Q4 2011 earnings call, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and other company execs said data will become the key component for driving innovation at the company that holds bits and bytes from more than 702 million unique visitors and users of its products and services.

"We can use data to render the experience exactly the way you want it to create uniquely relevant experiences in everything from content to the layout of the page to the flow between pages and, of course, the advertising," Thompson said.

Thompson called Yahoo's data the "single most underrated, underappreciated and underused asset."