Google Dashboard: What lies beneath?

Google Inc, the search giant has announced that it will provide a window called Google Dashboard to its users so that they can view what data Google is capturing from their activities on 20 products and services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Reader etc. The company had been criticized often for accumulating large data about its users and providing easy access to others. With the new application, users can now adjust privacy settings directly via Google Dashboard for their different Google products.
 
Google Dashboard

The service was launched in the first week of November, 2009 that lists information associated with all the Google services visitors’ use, which includes email address, contact numbers, all the conversations in the Gmail inbox, user’s Google profile and the most recent entries from the web history. It accumulates data from users’ different accounts like Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Web History, Checkout, Reader and YouTube.

According to the company, the Dashboard uses all the information, which was already available in the accounts and settings sections for each Google’s products, thus the new application provides all that information together at one place. For example, in Gmail, the Dashboard will list the number of conversations in your inbox or in your account, as well as your chat sessions.

Google further added that the new application would provide more transparency and control. It will also tell you that what does Google know about you and when did they know it?
 
Features of Google Dashboard

Google Dashboard uses a small icon to indicate whether the personal information is public or not. For example, if you are using Web Albums, where the pictures are available for public by default, users can upload the pictures and can make them private. Now, the new application can tell users that how many public/private albums they have.

It provides users to visit or edit their recent Google searches and other content formed via Blogger, Picasa, Google Calendar and other services. Therefore, it can be called as the summarizer or tabulator of your activities on Google. The new service also tells you about your visitors and their comments on your postings/albums.
 
Privacy concerns

Google has announced the new Dashboard service at the 31st International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in response to the privacy concerns about how the search giant handles personal information of its users. The new platform will offer links to privacy policies, help pages and account settings pages.

Where is the dashboard?

Users can find the Google dashboard by punching google.com/dashboard, or by login into your Google account like Gmail, then clicking on Settings, choosing Account Settings from the dropdown menu and then clicking again on the link next to Dashboard. On the Google Ads Preferences Page, users can specify their interests and can opt for Google's interest-based advertising.
 
Conclusion

Now, users can view the information present on the servers of Google, but it is not clear that how the search giant can use the information stored on its servers. However, the Google Dashboard is a nice application and will present useful information to its users.