[Infowarrior] - Google launches privacy Dashboard service

[Richard Forno]

Google launches privacy Dashboard service
What does Google know about me?
By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 5th November 2009 12:30 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/google_privacy_dashboard/

Google has launched a Dashboard service that's designed to show how  
much the search engine giant knows about its users online activities.

The service provides a summary of data associated with a specified  
Google account. Users gain the ability to view and manage data, which  
ranges from search engine queries and emails sent through Gmail  
through to videos viewed on YouTube, and much else besides. Users will  
usually have already consented to allow Google to keep tabs on their  
activities online, but the search engine giant's tentacles reach so  
far that it's tough to know how much information it holds on each of us.

Google Dashboard - which is designed to address privacy concerns over  
the search engine giant's propensity to catalogue data - is accessed  
by logging into a Google account. Surfers get a list of the number of  
items held on particular services (Calenders, Blogger, Shopper, Chat,  
Gmail etc. etc.) linking to the data repositories of these services  
for more detailed information.

Although the Dashboard service goes some way towards answering the  
question of what Google knows about our lives online, it doesn't  
really provide many clues about how Google uses this information. In  
addition, one thing not included in the run-down is cookie-based data  
Google collects via its huge online ad-serving business.

Even so, Google Dashboard holds a lot of potentially sensitive data,  
providing yet another good reason for users to use hard to guess  
(strong) passwords on their Gmail or other Google accounts.