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Google Dashboard: This is a brief of how much Google knows about you
- ErrantX 17y agoI scroll and I scroll and still not at the bottom! Apparently I use Google a scary amount :D
- maukdaddy 17y agoWow it is really sobering to see how much information one company has. Now imagine this spread across all the businesses you interact with on a daily basis.
- duh 17y ago> sobering to see how much information one company has > Now imagine Uhm - have you ever checked your credit report?
- jrockway 17y agoThe credit reporting agencies don't actually verify any of that information, so most of it is junk. Apparently my "legal name" is "Johnathon Rockway". Yeah...
- duh 17y ago> don't actually verify any of that information, > so most of it is junk How is this a logical progression? And does google "verify" any of its information?
- jrockway 17y agoGoogle collects its own information, so it is in control of the quality. When you pull someone's credit report, you don't know if what's listed is entirely accurate, and you don't know what it's omitting. So there is a difference.
- appathy 17y agoMicrosoft should come out with a similar service. I could use it as my homepage. Then I would have a blank page when I open up my browser.
- mlok 17y agoNot much interesting about me. I am happy not to have relied too much on Google for the last decade. God knows it can be difficult sometimes. Temptation is high.
- trebor 17y agoI use Google products, but not that much. The simple point is to: opt out of what you don't need. I use GMail, predominantly, and beyond that don't have much other information associated with my account. Privacy online isn't threatened by Google ... so much as it is by PEBKAC. ;-)
- vito 17y agoHmm. Some of these searches definitely aren't mine. I wonder if I'm signed in on my mom's computer or something... These date back quite a bit. looks over shoulder
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoyea, me too. all of these searches about burning sensations while peeing.. i mean, uhh...;)
- zargon 17y agoI don't have a google account. Could someone describe what is listed if you do?
- greyman 17y agoBasically, all the Google services you subscribed to, like Gmail, Alerts, Blogger, Youtube, Calendar, Docs, Health, how many Picasa Web Albums uploaded, what is your recent favorite Youtube video, recent Task, or your recent Web History (disabled for me).
- zargon 17y agoThanks. It's kind of surprising I've managed to avoid all that stuff. ;)
- msluyter 17y agoWoah! Just checked it and discovered that my personal calendar was public. This has been helpful already.
- 3dFlatLander 17y agoI logged in thinking there wouldn't be very much on me, since I had disabled web history when the feature first came out. It seems to have "reactivated" itself around October 2009 for some reason. Also, despite google telling me they only collect web searches, my history for image, news, and video searches are also included. Now I feel slightly uncomfortable.
- jules 17y agoMore importantly they also know which urls you visit for the sites that display google ads / use google analytics.
- stingraycharles 17y agoYou're forgetting one way more important thing: logs. Your access patterns to Google's sites is way more important than the information you see on this dashboard; based on your access patterns, most of the information in that dashboard can be predicted anyway.
- roc 17y agohttp://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=162743 http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=... Sounds like they have no intention of sharing the logs or cookie-related data either. We're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized and not actually linked back to our google accounts.
- fnid 17y agoThanks, I just went and deleted all my google cookies!
- alain94040 17y agoWe're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized Actually Google fought in court to make sure that it didn't have to anonymize its logs, ever. So it's a safe bet to assume that your logs are not anonymized.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- felixmar 17y agoThey should add delete buttons to all listed services which remove the service and content or at least reset everything to the default empty state.
- fnid 17y ago"Oh the better to advertise to you my pretty"
- fuzzmeister 17y agoI'm not sure it should be that easy - if you left that page open and walked away for one second someone could delete all of your mail, calendars, documents, pictures, blog posts... the works.
- brewski 17y agoUnder Account I clicked on "Websites authorized to access the account" and saw that clickpass had access to my Google Contacts. Why do they need access to that?
- duh 17y ago> Why do they need access to that? I think it may have something to do with making money.
- dschobel 17y agoI saw that as well. No idea when I approved that one...
- healsdata 17y agoLogging in to HN using Google prompted me to give Clickpass access to Google Contacts. Logging into StackOverflow with Google doesn't do that, so maybe Clickpass is using an old/weird method of Google auth?
- trjordan 17y agoI find it interesting that there is so much redundant and conflicting information in there. Mine has 3 different addresses, from the last three places I lived (and hadn't updated). I understand that they are all different services, but since they're all controlled by Google, why not add something to sync them? I'm pretty comfortable with all the information that's up there, so why not have the information constant, and leave the privacy settings down in the individual applications?
- JoeAltmaier 17y agoI use(d) only Google Docs, and it tells me "Detailed information from this service is unavailable at this time." Absolutely typical, which is why I abandoned it for other collaborative file sharing tools. Also I hit my "share quota" whatever that is. Typical of Google toys - not ready for a production environment. I know its free, but I can pay for real tools that don't fail me randomly (or as much anyway). Sigh. Didn't mean to rant. Sorry.
- imajes 17y agoNice, except google hasn't learnt how to do internationalization yet.
- stephen 17y agoI'd be more interested in knowing what Google's ad server (doubleclick) knows about me.
- fnid 17y agoAnd I block doubleclick in my hosts file. All this paranoia is starting to pay off!
- jrockway 17y agoBack when I worked at Doubleclick, the answer was "not much". We were not legally allowed to store your IP address, for example. (But, of course, we could store the md5 hash of your IP address. I love the legal system.) I am more worried about Analytics, which provides details of everything you do on nearly every site on the Internet to one centralized source. Needless to say, this is the reason why I have NoScript installed.
- enomar 17y agoAnalytics has the same restrictions on storing or using PII (personally identifiable information). None of that gets linked with your account.
- ropiku 17y agoDid they forget a staging link ? http://img.skitch.com/20091105-bk6g841s7gwags3y84ksf9gtgi.png http://img.skitch.com/20091105-bk6g841s7gwags3y84ksf9gtgi.pn...
- fnid 17y agoThis makes me glad I don't use Google products!
- ComputerGuru 17y agoA while back, I did everything I could to clear my YouTube account settings. Something I did apparently broke their code, and now YouTube viewing history is disabled. There is no option to disable YouTube viewing history in the preferences on either YouTube or Google, but somehow, thankfully, YouTube no longer records my video history. :)
- tome 17y agoI don't have any information about any searches I've done on google.com (and I definitely have done them!). Is there something special I need to do to see that info?
- tome 17y agoAh I see, something called "Google Web History" exists to explicitly track your searches. I never knew this before, and I'm glad I'm not signed up!
- bjelkeman-again 17y agoThis was discussed earlier today at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923355 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923355
- stakent 17y agoThere are other places where Google gathers lots of information about you: blogspot, youtube, all sites using Google Analytics, all sites serving Adsense ads, all sites serving doubleclick ads, all sites using Google Analytics. So: Clear your cookies. Use tor. Don't forget about flash cookies. Don't forget that your computer's real time clock skew can reveal it's identity. By examining packets sent from it. Funny times to live?
- gradschool 17y agoAlso, the Ghostery Firefox plugin is supposed to be good for blocking Google Analytics and similar services.
- dennisgorelik 17y agoWhy is that a problem that Google knows about you? Google knows about me a lot, and I think it's a good thing, because: 1) I might be found by relevant people. 2) It adds up to my reputation, for example it may help to send email and have it delivered, because I look like a real person. What are the downsides of Google watching you/me?
- stakent 17y agoYes, there are advantages being known online. But we are not talking about about search results. We are talking about wide and not controlled by us stream of data stored somewhere. Risks for a user? For example exploiting one's weaknesses by, in most trivial case, serving her ads or search results tailored to push her to make desired action. I, personally, prefer to build my online image by taking my own conscious actions, not by data hungry algorithm running by corporation which goal is to maximize shareholder's value. Edit: added missing not in first paragraph
- jbyers 17y agoGreat, that reminded me to remove something I apparently put on my Google Products wishlist in 2005(?)
- dskhatri 17y agoAlso related, Google's Data Liberation Front: http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/ "The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." They provide information on how to "escape" from a particular service ie. download/migrate data from that service. However, I can't find any indication of whether there is a way to permanently delete all your data from their servers.
- teeja 17y agoThat's a Good Thing. Ever spent a year adding data to a site (like oh, say, Stumbleupon) only to notice that there's no way to get your work out? I did. DL lets you export to several other blogformats. That's much cooler.
- xiaoma 17y agoEven on a laptop with English versions of Windows and Firefox and my Google accounts language set to English, it still displays that page in Chinese. What a terrible design choice, assuming the intent is to make it easy for users to see how much of their personal information is out there. For anybody frustrated by this behavior, the way to force it into English is to append ?hl=en to the end of the URL.