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Google Dashboard Disappoints
Posted November 10th, 2009 | in Google, Lead Story, News | No Comments »
Online privacy – or lack thereof – is an increasingly important issue. The more you use an online service, the more the company providing it knows about you. When a company provides as many services as Google does they can build up a scarily comprehensive picture of your life.
Of course this information is mainly used to make your online experience better, for instance by providing personalised search results. But it can also be used for more controversial purposes such as behaviour targeted advertising. Even if the data is never used, the fact that it’s even being collected worries many people.
Google have responded to growing privacy concerns by launching the Google Dashboard. Google says:
In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over your own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, 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 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.
It sounds great. Unfortunately the reality is very disappointing.
The new Dashboard simply gives you consolidated access to the account privacy settings already available on some Google properties such as YouTube. As far as I can see it doesn’t provide any information that wasn’t already available. Nor does it provide any more control than was already available on the individual sites.
The biggest absence is any reference to Google cookies and to search history, extremely privacy sensitive areas. Also missing is the ability to see other personal information Google might have about you such as ad clicking habits, IP address related data, etc.
In the control field there’s nothing new. I’d expect any privacy dashboard to have big buttons for “clear all cookies” and “clear all history” right at the top. There are also no direct links to important options such as ad cookie opt-out.
Google Dashboard isn’t completely useless, it does make checking your settings slightly more convenient. However if Google really consider it a significant contribution to user privacy then they need to think again.
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