Google responds to privacy critics with Google dashboard :: The Future of the Internet

Google responds to privacy critics with Google dashboard

November 10th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in cybersecurity, Future of the Internet | 4 Comments

Most readers of this blog probably use several Google products; my rough count is that I use about 15. Privacy advocates have been understandably concerned about having so much information stored by one company.

In partial response to these concerns, Google created the Google dashboard, a site that tells you which Google apps you use and what data they’ve stored. (From the Google home page, if you’re signed in, you can find it under Settings > Google Account Settings > Dashboard.) It’s kind of fun to browse the list—a trip down cyber-memory lane, as it were. It prompted me to finally delete the “practice blog” I set up for my intro CS class (eight years ago). Most people will probably find a few unexpected nuggets of data lurking in Google’s admin folders.

Frankly, though, I’m not sure it will make privacy advocates feel any better. Here’s why:

1. Just having a list of your accounts, data, and settings doesn’t mean it’s easy to figure out how to change anything. You have to do that within the app’s internal settings. I couldn’t figure out how to delete my Google tasks account entirely, and Robert Cringley of PC World had a similar problem with Orkut.

2. It’s nice to have all this information centralized, but most people will already know 95% of what they find on Google dashboard. People who are really concerned about privacy could have easily collected this data themselves (and probably did). John Paczkowski has more on this here. He notes that Google doesn’t show “cookie data” that is used to serve targeted ads, which an individual user couldn’t collect. However, that data is associated with browsing history, not a Google account, and it’s also clear why Google would be stingy with it. “Cookie data” is conceptually different than account information, and offering it isn’t a logical extension of Dashboard, although there could be legitimate debate about whether users should have access to data collected about their browsing habits.

3. It’s potentially useful for thieves. You have to re-enter your password to access Dashboard, so someone who happens upon your open gmail account won’t have access. But if someone gets access to your password, they’ll have a list of all the other products they should check, along with your mobile phone number, if you’ve set it as a password recovery option.

Overall: I appreciate the move towards giving users control over their data. The impulse—to develop tools that will be used by people other than hard-core privacy advocates—is a great one. This tool could use more functionality, though, particularly in making it easier to delete or manage data right from the Dashboard.

(Edited after posting to reflect more thoughts on points 2 and 3.)

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Responses

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Saqib Ali says:

November 10th, 2009 at 5:05 pm (#)

Elisabeth,

I agree that most people who are concerned with privacy would have already collected their google footprint. I did that as well. It is easy to do that once or twice, but not so convenient to perform that task on a weekly basis. Google Privacy dashboard automates the compilation process.

But how many people will visit their privacy dashboard on a weekly basis?

Saqib
Saqib Ali says:

November 10th, 2009 at 5:08 pm (#)

P.S. Google sees privacy as a personal preference, not as a moral right :)
arno klein says:

December 10th, 2009 at 10:13 am (#)

In the dashboard, you can “Clear entire Web History” and when you click “pause,” it states “This service will not collect any history until you choose to resume.”

cheers,
@rno
Saqib Ali says:

December 13th, 2009 at 12:05 am (#)

After coming in #10 in the Ponemon Institute’s TRUSTe survey of most trusted companies in 2007[1], Google has remained off the list for the last two years[2,3].

1. http://www.truste.com/pdf/2007_Most_Trusted_Companies.pdf
2. http://www.truste.com/about_TRUSTe/press-room/news_truste_ponemon_name_trusted_companies_08.html
3. http://www.truste.com/about_TRUSTe/press-room/news_truste_2009_most_trusted_companies_for_privacy.html

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