Last week Google updated its privacy-control tool, called Google Dashboard. This tool basically shows you all the information that Google has been compiling about you since you created one of its Gmail accounts.
You can get the information divided by tools: gmail, youtube, blogger, calendar… and provides you with all the data of the use you have been doing with those tools while logged with Gmail: from the videos you watched on youtube, to the last email you sent to a friend. Creepy, right? You can see how it works in the following video:
Google created this option after all the speculations about all the information that they keep about us, and how they use it. They said that it’s an “act of transparency” to the users, to give them the opportunity to control all this information, and delete what they don’t want Google to know about them, but… are we sure that Google is being 100% honest with that? Or are they still hiding some information for themselves? One of the main uses that Google hadfor this information is for their Online Ads platform Google Adwords, where you can target ads to users depending on their gender, sex, age and even interests. Don’t you think that this new “privacy management” will make them lose a lot of useful information to target their campaigns?
This seems to be more an act for cleaning their image than a real act of privacy transparency, because Google is not going to do something that could harm itself, and that could make them lose a lot of money in advertising terms.
If you think about it, the theory that it’s just a way to clean their image makes sense when we think about other ways which they can still get information about us, like through Google Chrome, or now through their internet service, Google Fiber (currently rolling out in some US areas), through which they will be able to know all our online activity (again).
Obviously we don’t really know the real intentions of Google, and we will probably never know, but now a lot of people are more calm and not complaining about Google, because they know “all” the information that Google is keeping about them.
