How much does Google know about you? There’s an app for that.
For years those concerned with privacy have asked, “How much does Google know about you?“ Many of us use multiple Google products: G-mail, Chrome, Picasa, YouTube, Google Calendar, Blogger, and now, Google Voice. Some worried about just how much data Google is able to gather based on our activity on their various sites.
Well, Google is now answering that question, and I applaud them.
Google released Google Dashboard this month. It allows you to see all the data stored on you and on which sites the search giant tracks you. You can sign in here.
Being tracked online is the price we pay for getting to wander the Internet free of charge. Google delivers many great products, and, in return, gathers information on us to maximize the money it can make off of advertising.
I don’t consider that unethical but I do think being transparent about this is a huge step in the right direction.
The Google Dashboard is being touted as a way for users to, at a glance, see information about their Web usage, email usage and more when they are logged into Google services such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Calendar. Google provides an overview of the Dashboard in a video in its main blog. Dashboard will let users delete information as well, a move that could help to address privacy concerns that have been raised surrounding Google’s collection of so much data about its users’ online habits.
via Google Dashboard Bows to Users’ Privacy Concerns – PC World.
I checked out my own profile and was amazed to see how comprehensive it was. I have 10,354 conversations in my Gmail account. That’s a lot of data to mine. And now that I’m using Google voice, Google keeps track of my text messages with other Google voice users.
Being aware of this is empowering, and I suggest you check it out. If it makes you uncomfortable, you can opt out of some of these services.
What’s missing is the data that Google has from non-account associated activity. Like our searching and web-surfing. I imagine that Google does have a history of the search terms we’ve typed in and the websites we’ve visited while logged into our accounts. But that’s not included in this Dashboard. (Google does hint at this tracking with its Google Ads Preferences manager, which lets you set “interests” for ads.)
Here’s Google’s explanatory video about Dashboard:
(Hattip: Thanks for g-mailing me about this, Steve!)
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It actually reveals you web history too – but only if you have enabled Web History tracking separately. Through my web history tracking on Dashboard I discovered the last product I had searched for was a Winnie the Pooh coo-coo clock in September. Yeah.
I was actually hoping for a bit more from this – it’s convenient that the dashboard features all of this in one place, but it’s all data that can be found through the individual settings pages of google products. This is just a streamlined version of what I already knew. I wanted insight into who I am to them as a consumer – what are the keywords from my gmail account they latch onto, how do they link my calendar to searches to maps, etc. That’s all proprietary, so they’ll never tell – but then again it’s the only thing it would actually tell me something about my privacy. This seems like just another PR move.
Once we’ve finally been assimilated into the Google collective, individual privacy may be futile… not to mention irrelevant.
In response to another comment. See in context »