Dashboard Reveals What Google Knows About You

CWmike writes "Ever wonder exactly what Google knows about you? Google took a step today to answer that question with the unveiling of Google Dashboard, which is designed to let users see and control the copious amounts of data that Google has stored in its servers about them. 'Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data,' Google said in a blog post today. 'In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard.' Dashboard is set up so that users can control the personal settings in each Google product that they use. Google said the tool supports more than 20 products, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts and Google Latitude. Consumer Watchdog said in a statement today that it applauds Google for giving users a single place to go to manage their data. But at the same tine, the group also came down hard on Google, contending that it needs to give users a vehicle for stopping the company from collecting any personal data."

Comments

Dashboard reveals what they want to

[syousef]

Their dashboard simply reveals what they want you to know you keep.

Love or hate Google it would be naive to think otherwise.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[syousef]

What I really wanted to know is how much information they keep when I occasionally perform search using Google while being logged into Google

In other words, you want to know if they're logging your porn searches ;-)

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[pwilli]

"Web History" is what you were looking for. It is available at the dashboard.

It's the list of everything you searched through google when you were logged into your account, complete with dates. My backlog in there reached back to early 2007. Now I've deleted all entries and deactivated that "feature".

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[Anonymous Coward]

I disabled it when it was first announced, but it is unreasonable to think that does anything but just make Google not show it to you. It is unreasonable to expect them to not keep those logs.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[pwilli]

Of course, Google is and always will be a black box like any other company when it comes to storage of such data.

But by deleting and disabling it I at least make sure that nobody besides Google can access that information, even if they somehow find out my password.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[twostix]

Even so, just looking at what's there, all in one place there's only one word for it faaaaaark.

It's like a time machine where I can look into my life for the last 3 and half years and see what my state of mind was at any point in time.

Sometimes it was not pretty, things we forget over time ey?

Also at what point did the search tracking automatically become opt-in? Last I heard it was only voluntary when did they sneak that change through?

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[Sam Douglas]

No, its real utility is seeing what is publicly accessible. I didn't realise my Youtube account was sharing my name (username), age and gender publicly.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[bennomatic]

my understanding is that they anonymize any logs that are not to be kept associated with any particular account. I don't know all the details, but they are apparently thorough enough that it's caused some consternation with some courts who have tried to subpoena logs as evidence, only to find that they couldn't get anything useful.

I don't have a link, but my recollection is that when their process was challenged (anonymizing after 30 days), they not only defended their right to do so, but also shortened the period to 15 days or some such.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[QuantumG]

And your ISP.. or anyone who has poisoned your DNS cache and is transparently proxying you.. or just about anyone who logs http-request traffic on the backbone.

Oh, and anyone who has access to your web browser history/cache.. but you knew that.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[thePig]

Web History is extremely important to google in many ways. So I do not think they will do anything wrong with it, since it would cause people to stop using cookies.

As an example usage that I can think of, say, Suppose a person search for the text ’yyy’ in Google Search. Now, of the links he received, he reads the text associated with each link and clicks on 3 or 4 links to open in new tabs/windows. He gets the information he requires from the 3rd link, and so he closes the pages and is done with the search. Now, after a few days, he again requires the same information. He again types the text ’yyy’ in search, and now of all the links, there is a higher probability of the 3rd link being clicked first before the others, because it provided value to him earlier. The more times he searches, the higher the probability of the link being clicked. Now, by using this information, google can consider that the 3rd link in this case provided more value to the user than others. Since this is very powerful data, i.e. it is as good as user telling google that this link has given me more value than others, the page rank of that page can be increased based on this.

There are so many other scenarios that I can think of - and these are very simple scenarios, with very less implementation issues (other than stopping people trying to game google), using web history. I dont think they will misuse web history in any way because of this.

Note: I am not sure whether the method I mentioned here is used by google or not. It was just a mechanism I could think of.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[hoggoth]

"Web History" is not available on MY dashboard. No mention of it at all, no listing of it being enabled or disabled. Nothing.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[Zebedeu]

Probably because it's not enabled in the first place.
Try visiting http://www.google.com/history and see if the page suggests that you turn the service on.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[commodore64_love]

>>>my Youtube account was sharing my name (username)

Which one? The good news is that if you're over age 35, the advertisers ignore you. They are only interested in the young malleable people (seriously) who are easily-convinced to try new products. The rest of us are old and set in our ways, and therefore of little interest to advertisers.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[maotx]

Not entirely accurate.

Google anonymizes data that is older than nine months, unless said data is tied to a Google account.

Re:Dashboard reveals what they want to

[clemdoc]

Is that what you were looking for? http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=162743

How to prevent companies from collecting data...

[t33jster]

the group also came down hard on Google, contending that it needs to give users a vehicle for stopping the company from collecting any personal data.

1. I'm going to patent 'not using a company's products and services' in order to prevent them from collecting data.
2. License my fantastic invention
3. Profit!!

More like what Google THINKS it knows

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say only about 5% of my Google searches are something that pertain to me. The rest are queries to answer questions others have asked, or nonsense searches triggered by external events - random words heard on the radio, items from junk mail my uncle sends, stuff from the newspaper.

I clear my cache often, and often search for the equal and opposite of what I want to know about. Search for elder care, followed by kindergartens, then diabetes tests and discount candy bars.

Re:More like what Google THINKS it knows

[Anonymous Coward]

And from that I can tell you are an old diabetic pedophile looking for children, but health conscious about what candy bars you give to them.

Re:More like what Google THINKS it knows

[twostix]

Looking in the Dashboard at what they "know" about for the last three years and it strikes me that it would be very easy for someone to draw some pretty outrageous conclusions about who I am, what I think and what I do.

Pray that governments never get open access to mine their database I say!

Re:More like what Google THINKS it knows

[Hurricane78]

Well said. It's not what you have to hide! It's what they want to find!

Add to that the Cardinal Richelieu way of thinking:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

And you have a recipe for terror. Real terror. Not that TV "terror".

Let's add another hole.

[pspahn]

Headline reads:
Starbucks wifi user identity stolen when rogue AP steals dashboard info.

Mottos

[gmuslera]

Slashdot: New for nerds, stuff that matters

Google Dashboard: All your data are belong to us

Re:Mottos

[Sparx139]

Somebody set up us the google bomb.

Let's add a link.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it wasn't in the summary, https://www.google.com/dashboard/ is Google Dashboard.

Re:Let's add a link.

[Pete (big-pete)]

Well that's annoying...one thing Google doesn't do intelligently is languages. I am logged into my account, they KNOW I speak English as a preferred language, but when I go to my iGoogle page on my iPhone whilst I'm in Belgium it insists on displaying everything in Dutch.

That was annoying enough...but now the dashboard is doing the same, even when I visit the page from my laptop.

Google, you KNOW I speak English, stop overriding my account setting for my language with demographic data based on my IP address. When I'm traveling it doesn't make me fluent in the local language...

*slaps the company on the nose with a rolled up newspaper* Bad Google, bad bad portal!

-- Pete.

Re:Let's add a link.

[Nasarius]

I know, this is total bullshit. I've been living in Germany for about 1.5 years now, I use an English-language browser, I've set everything I possibly can in Google to English, and it still constantly gives me random pages in German, like the OpenID login. What the fuck? Let me set my language in one place and then *keep it*, or recognize that if my user agent is in English, I probably want English. Overriding such things based on geography is astoundingly stupid, given the large number of travelers and expats in the world.

Belgium must be a particularly strange example...do the Walloons get Dutch too?

Re:Let's add a link.

[Nasarius]

I can kind of excuse the crap job that Google has done with consolidating settings; lots of their apps were bought from other companies, and they're just starting to make the Google profile a significant thing. But what I absolutely do not get is why they (and pretty much every other website in the world) completely ignore the Accept-Language browser header, which is sent properly by every browser.

It's such an obvious bit of information to use, it requires no IP-based geolocation, there must be some reason I'm not thinking of that they don't use it. Can anybody explain?

Re:Let's add a link.

[brentonboy]

Wait... we're mad at Google for not keeping track of some personal data on you (language) and using it? I thought we were mad at Google because they *do* do that.

Re:Let's add a link.

[weeeeed]

1. Go to google.cz,
2. klick on "Google.com in English" (http://www.google.com/ncr)
3. ???
4. Profit!!!1 (permanent cookie)

Re:Let's add a link.

[DamonHD]

Because my stats suggest that most people leave it set to a default of en-US, ie US English, so when Accept-Language has that in it it mainly means 'I left it the way Microsoft set it' rather than 'I speak US English'.

It makes providing any internationalisation frustrating, since the browser mechanism doesn't help much.

Rgds

Damon

PS. Conversely, if your 'Accept-Language' is set to anything other than English it's a pretty hot clue...

Re:Let's add a link.

[bheer]

Google does appear to honor the Accept-Language header setting (which you can set in Firefox).

For example, I just set my Firefox language setting to "German [de]", cleared my cookies and visited google.com. Lo and behold, Google.com in German. Interestingly, it didn't auto-redirect me to Google UK -- I'm in England right now -- although there's a link to Google UK at the bottom.

If you change browser settings like this, be sure to clear your cookies first -- sometimes existing cookies contain prefs about which site you want to go to, clearing them lets you start from a clean slate.

Re:How to prevent companies from collecting data

[Slow Smurf]

What about Google ads(or any other tracking mechanism), or when Google buys a company that you used to use instead of Google?

It's not as simple as not using their products, unfortunately.

Bosses around the world say 'Thank You'

[that this is not und]

Now there's an easy tool provided by Google to identify what employees are doing with Google-related products while on the job. You didn't think anything you did on your work computer was your private information, did you?

WTF?

[BodeNGE]

It's asking me to login. I don't have a login to Google "services". How do I see the info that Google has on my browsing history without logging in?

Re:WTF?

[0123456]

There are these new-fangled things called 'cookies', which get sent to Google every time you view one of their ads, which are on roughly 99.99% of web pages these days unless you block access to those servers.

Re:WTF?

[TheLink]

Cookies.

Or less likely - detection of cached images or files.

Youtube can give video suggestions based on what was watched using the browser even if an account is not created.

Re:WTF?

[pwilli]

But it would be a even worse privacy nightmare to present someone all the data that has been collected associated to a specific cookie and/or IP address if it is not somehow verified, that the person trying to watch that information is actually the same that produced the data (e.g. the one who made the search queries).

So even if cookie or IP-specific data is stored, showing it to you is a bad idea.

Window dressing

[rpp3po]

I would have expected Slashdot to note the fact, that Google does not mention anywhere wether the presented data is even nearly complete. Without that it is just a sham, giving you the feeling of control, but possibly only touching the tip of the iceberg.

Re:Window dressing

[pwilli]

Were you always logged into your account when you used Google? My web history contained almost everything I ever searched through Google for the last years. It only had "holes" for some weeks in between, when I e.g. started to use another computer to go online and didn't bother to check my E-Mails or do anything else that would need me to enter my credentials.

Re:Window dressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Having seen what they say they have on me, two thoughts come to mind: Either they are being misleading and this is just the things they feel like telling me, or they are really incompetent because the stuff they say they know about me is pretty limited (and I'm a HEAVY Google user).

I don't work at Google, but I've interned there several times, and people on SlashDot just don't have a clue when talking about Google's approach to privacy. There's well over 100 teams all doing their own separate stuff, largely unaware of what other people are doing. A few of them harvest a bunch of info from users but most don't bother, and almost nobody harvests data from one application and then passes it onto another application, unless it would be crazy not to. At least for now, Google doesn't track people anywhere near as close as Slashdotters think they do. Since they aren't interested in selling that data to other people and since they don't know how to monetize most kinds of personal data anyway, there's just way too little to gain for what is actually a pretty monumental undertaking.

Google does what it does because it's run by ordinary people with a lot of ideas and a loose management structure. There is no conspiracy, and at least for now, people on SlashDot would be shocked by how little info about you they have readily available.

Stop collecting personal data

[wiredlogic]

...needs to give users a vehicle for stopping the company from collecting any personal data.

Um.. It's a free service, and collecting user data (most of which is anonymized) is a core feature of their ad services. Why exactly does Google need to hobble its business model again?

Re:Stop collecting personal data

[QuantumG]

Just curious, has anyone ever presented any evidence that Google uses collected user data for their ad services?

I mean, you state it as if it was a fact.. it's not.

You don't have to use Google

[mmsimanga]

No one has to use google and when you chose to then you should be aware your data is going to be on their servers. Personally I do not enter personal information.

Bleedingly obvious?

[girlintraining]

But at the same tine, the group also came down hard on Google, contending that it needs to give users a vehicle for stopping the company from collecting any personal data.

Don't login. Disable cookies. Any questions?

I WANT them to collect my data!

[Bifurcati]

Believe it or not, Google is a free service (for the most part) supported by advertising. I love the stuff that Google does, the way they handle advertising, and the way that advertising is actually (for the first time ever on the net) actually relevant. They've never done anything to earn my mistrust, far from it. So if by giving them my search histories I can improve both their overall advertising revenue and my own browsing experience, then I am more than willing to do so.

If things ever go wrong, well, then I'll suffer the consequences. But people demanding Google stop collecting this information is just crazy talk. Yes, Google is fast becoming a necessity because of its sheer usefulness, but it's by no means crossed the line and doesn't look like it will. If you're really that worried - just don't use Gmail, Gcalendar or any of those other things. Your Google searches will still be reasonably anonymous!

Honestly, it's rubbish like this that gives privacy advocates a bad name. Fight a battle worth fighting, for cryin' out loud.

Re:I WANT them to collect my data!

[zwei2stein]

You can love google and still be worried.

Mostly because while they had no personal info leaks in past, it does not necessarily have to be so in future. You can trust google and appreciate that they use your personal info to make your web experience less painful, but you can not trust anyone who gets their dirty hands of their database...

So yeah, real concern is in there. Especially that google becomes juicier and juicier target each day.

useful to learn of hackings

[story645]

I learned that a youtube account was registered using my email address, and that I could access the account with my gmail account. So dashboard forced me to change my email address and try to navigate youtube's awful (non-existent) reporting pages. I finally got the right page by sending an email to the wrong people. Otherwise, dashboard showed the existence of things that clicking didn't show up, and the whole thing comes across as a gimmick to get people to sign up for the google services they're not already signed up for.

How about a link to the dashboard?

[seifried]

3 links, not a single one to the actual dashboard.

http://www.google.com/dashboard

Re:How about a link to the dashboard?

[mehrotra.akash]

though its about a different article, but still PLS IMPLEMENT THIS - whenever possible, direct link to what the summary is about should be compulsory

Solution

[Teferison]

Visit http://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect) and google will no longer use your geolocation to determine what pages you want to see.
Cookies required

It's Friday morning

[The name is Dave. Ja]

But at the same tine, the ...

I guess we'll see a fork coming soon.

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