Google is getting more serious about privacy. This was evident from the recent launch of their latest tool called Google Dashboard that aims to give you more control over your personal data stored on Google’s servers. From your Google Dashboard you can view the company’s privacy policies, easily access your most recent activity for each Google service you use, and manage settings for those services.
My initial impression is that Dashboard is a quick and easy way to get greater control over your Google Account activity, and even clean up any services you may have forgotten about. Knowing the fact that Google had access to all of my information, this tool was a pleasant surprise and gave me some level of comfort.
Here is a quick look at the dashboard.
To get into Google Dashboard, sign into your Google Account, click on the settings link at Google.com, and select “Google Account Settings.” You can also click on “My Account” from your iGoogle page. This will take you to your Google Account page where you select “View data stored with this account” under “Personal Settings.” Google will then ask you to enter your Google Account password again as an extra security measure before redirecting you to your Dashboard.
It should also be noted that from your Google Account page you can also see a list of all the Google services you use, but Dashboard gives you more information about what kind of data you have stored on each Google service.
When you land on Dashboard you will see a list of your Google services on the left-hand side. This list contains information about the Google services you use including your recent activity and basic statistics. Under Gmail, for example, you can see you how many messages you’ve sent, how many conversations are in your inbox, the number of Gmail chats you have saved, and even how many items are in your trash. Very neat!
The statistics feature in Dashboard was particularly useful for me allowing me to take control of various services I hadn’t used for a long time. For example, I’d completely forgotten that I’d signed up with Picasa and had an album!
On the left side of Dashboard, you will see several links for managing your settings for each service and links to Google’s privacy and help pages. Gmail in Dashboard, for example, lets you navigate directly to controls for your chat, security and general settings.
It would be nice to see other services such as Google Maps, Google News and also the business centric services such as Adwords and Google Analytics included in this dashboard. In particularly, I’m interested to see how they will include Google Wave into this. But knowing Google, I’m sure they have a plan for all of these services already. |
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