Read this article on PC Pro.
Search giant Google is coming clean over the amount of personal data it holds on its users.
Dubbed Google Dashboard, the service allows users to log in and find all the personal information held about them in Google’s myriad applications, including Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and several more.
The Dashboard gives a highly detailed, application-by-application breakdown of what’s stored in your account. Gmail, for example, includes full transcripts of archived web chats and logs of the most recent messages in key folders.
Web History, meanwhile, shows full details of searches made across all of Google’s services, including images, maps and the regular web search. It allows users to wipe their entire search history from the Dashboard screen.
Users of Google Latitude, the service that broadcasts your current position to approved contacts, are also shown the last destination logged.
Much, if not all, of this information has been made available previously through the individual applications. However, this is the first time Google has collated the data into a single screen.
Google says Dashboard is designed to offer users “greater transparency and control over their data”.
“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,” the company claims on the Google blog.
You can log in to your Google Dashboard here.
And when we know what Google knows, what shall we do then, Lord T?
I suppose I’ll never know what they have about me – not signed up to anything Google that I know of.
A very useful post, thanks, but everything Google knows about us it surely knows just because we have chosen to use its services, which it offers for free. We can just stop using free offerings if we don’t want to tell the service providers stuff about us, surely? Or have I misunderstood? (Not a sarcastic rhetorical question – a real one, as some of these issues confuse me). If we have to start paying the search providers for each use of a search engine it would give us a shock back into the bad old days.
James,
You can then delete what you don’t want them to know.
Ivan,
Not sure that is true but I suspect they know more than you think. It’s just they don’t link it to a Google address so you have no way of finding out.
Andrew,
That is partially true. However, don’t forget people send you EMails too and this generates links you may not know exist. I’ve seen some of the data that links people together and you would be surprised what it shows up. For example my blogger account started without a Google EMail address. MyName@mydoman.co.uk. Google knows this and when it is trawling the web it finds this email in a forum for dwarf porn or something. It makes the link and nothing to do with their services, freeor otherwise. Hell, I’m already, as are many others, on MI5s watch list because of my browsing activities.
You would be surprised some of the links that you can make when you look everywhere. I would suggest you read ‘The Broken Window’ by Jeffrey Deaver. One of my favourite authors if you want your eyes opened on what data mining is doing now. Why do you think our government wants to build these databases and I have such a concern about Google. Stalin would have loved this technology.
Interesting thoughts Lord T, thanks. I think we all have to accept that if we use this technology we don’t have much control over who may see what we say, and always be aware of that. Although you say to James he can “delete” his data, is it really deleted? Not at all, I suspect, if someone who controls the data doesn’t want it deleted. It could just be moved into the “User deleted so may be interesting” folder. So by “deleting” it you could just flag it up and make someone’s job easier. But I think in China we see a huge contest, and test case, underway between a state trying to control the internet, and perhaps use it FOR control; and ordinary citizens using it to do what they want regardless of what the state wants. Not sure about this verdict, but it does seem to me the citizens may be winning, though it is a tough fight. I think the internet will free up and gradually democratise China, rather than extending the state’s control, overall. Certainly hope so. I personally try to remind myself, whenever I use the internet for anything, especially for the falsely private-seeming medium of email, that what I am doing is perhaps the equivalent of shouting in a loudhailer in a public place.
Andrew,
The only control we have is what private data to put out there. Bearing in mind data you consider private but in government’s hands is anything but. Once it is out it is too late. It will never get deleted. Use different EMail addresses for different things and try not to accidentally send them to the wrong places. E.g. Andrew@domain1.co.uk gets used to send Email for personal use. AS@domain2.co.uk you use for your blogging and political work and BigBoy@domain3.co.uk you use to communicate with your fetish newsgroup and so on. There are plenty of free Emails out there. If you want I’ll even let you use one on one of my domains. Others already have one.
China’s problem with control is those annoying westerners sticking their noses in and providing proxies, anonmailers and other tools. As our governments clamp down on these tools for their own reasons then China will find its job much easier. With our governments going towards China and Russia’s surveillance policies its going to be making their lives easier.