Google Is Watching You – Very, Very Closely

On November 5th, Google released “Google Dashboard”(not our familiar Blogger Dashboard) to combat privacy concerns expressed by thousands of organizations and individuals from all over the world.  Their announced goal was to comfort users by allowing us poor peons to see some of the personal data Google is storing about each of us.  The new Dashboard even allows us to control and delete some of it – how quaint! 

I had a look at the new Dashboard, and instead of being comforted, it scared the wits out of me!  It knows everything we do.  Right on this Dashboard, you can see summaries of your latest emails, web sites visited, searches, calendar entries, contacts, images and videos viewed, recent chats and everything else you use Google for.  It even summarizes your last trash and spam emails!

This is just a portion of a sample Google Dashboard displaying information it collects

Here’s Google’s description of Dashboard:  "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their 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."

Click on the Image below to go to a YouTube Video that explains Dashboard

Or, to go directly to the Dashboard, just  sign into your Google Account and you will see Dashboard at the top in the first section.  I guarantee you will be just as shocked as I was when I first saw it.  I keep wondering “Just exactly how many thousands of trillions of bytes of disk space do these guys actually have anyway?” 

Am I going to stop using Google products because of this?  No, I’m not – I like Google products.  Instead, I’ll just use the Dashboard to manage and control settings just as they’ve suggested.  I’ve got another idea, though!  Maybe the Canadian and U.S. Governments could save billions of tax dollars by just getting rid of a few intelligence agencies and turning the job over to Google?

The Googleplex – What’s really going on down there?

I’m not paranoid about Google, really .  However, I use Sitemeter to track hits and one of the displays I get shows the location of visitors to my blog.  One of the places that always shows up on my list is Mountain View, CA.  Guess where the headquarters of Google, Inc. is located?  Mountain View, CA.  Uh-oh!!

Have a great Monday, and thanks for visiting.