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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.

How about a link to the dashboard?

[seifried]

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

http://www.google.com/dashboard

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.
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