• Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Show Just How Much It Knows About you

    Thursday, November 5th, 2009

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile.

    But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.

    So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.

    If you want more detailed data, it sends you to the particular data repository for that product. And for security purposes it does not create a second database of all the data, it just brings it up in your browser without restoring it server-side.

    The Dashboard is only for Google products which require you to sign in with your Google account. It does not include cookie-based data Google collects through DoubleClick ads or other ads. For that, you need to go to the Ad Preference Manager, which has its own issues.

    You can see the list of all the products the Dashboard keeps track of below.

    Account & profile
    Web-history
    Gmail
    Docs
    Calendar
    YouTube
    Blogger
    iGoogle
    Latitude
    Reader
    Talk
    Health
    Orkut
    Picasa
    Shopping List
    Voice
    Contacts
    Alerts
    Finance
    Friend Connect
    Tasks
    Custom search engines
    Mobile Sync

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