With more than 20 popular products and services, including e-mail, blogs, and, of course, search, there is perhaps no company in the world that knows more about you than Google. Naturally, this has made the company a popular target for privacy activists. Whether it’s testifying before Congress over behavioral advertising, or facing criticism over its Street View services, Google is constantly facing questions about its privacy policies. Despite these criticisms, however, Google has taken few significant steps toward helping users control the information they share with Google. Until today, that is.
This morning, Google released the Google Dashboard, a new feature that is supposed to provide “transparency, choice, and control” to your Google account. According to the official Google Blog, “the Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location…the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.” The post goes on to say that, “the scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard.” Check below for a video demonstrating the Google Dashboard in action.
So, does the Google Dashboard really provide the transparency it promises? As cute as the video is, truthfully, all the Google Dashboard does is provide a list of privacy-related settings for Google products. Granted, this does it make it much easier to access and alter your privacy settings, but I would hardly call it unprecedented. Perhaps the best most useful aspect of the Google Dashboard is discovering old Google applications that you no longer use.
What’s really interesting about Google Dashboard is that it only gives you control over the information you willingly gave them in the first place. In other words, all of the things that people really criticize Google for (data mining, for example) are still out of reach for average web surfers. Maybe the best thing about the Google Dashboard is that it will wake people up to how much Google really does know about us and get them to ask, “How much information should I be sharing online?”
What do you think about Google Dashboard? Are you happy with the feature?
3 comments ↓
Google did a great job with the Dashboard, as mentioned in the video it made it easy to control your privacy on the internet and what information you are already sharing with people.
But when it comes to sharing your private information with Google. I disagree with the phobia that privacy activists are creating telling people how creepy it is to share your info with Google. The privacy policy is so strict and a big company like Google take a thousand consideration before lunching such a product to make sure not violating the privacy of it’s users.
I think the big concern among privacy activists is that people willingly turn over so much of the their private lives to companies like Google with little regard for where that information could end up. Granted, it’s very unlikely that Google will violate their terms of service (and their own unofficial “Don’t Be Evil” motto) by exposing or selling user information, but the truth is, most people don’t even consider things like that as possibilities. It’s like people only realize the value of their privacy when it’s been breached.
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