Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Show Just How Much It Knows About you

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/05/google-gives-you-a-privacy-dashboard-to-show-just-how-much-it-knows-about-you/

Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Show Just How Much It Knows About you
by Erick Schonfeld on November 5, 2009

The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile.

But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.

So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.

If you want more detailed data, it sends you to the particular data repository for that product. And for security purposes it does not create a second database of all the data, it just brings it up in your browser without restoring it server-side.

The Dashboard is only for Google products which require you to sign in with your Google account. It does not include cookie-based data Google collects through DoubleClick ads or other ads. For that, you need to go to the Ad Preference Manager, which has its own issues.

You can see the list of all the products the Dashboard keeps track of below.

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync


http://www.infowars.com/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-said-googles-mission-is-to-store-all-the-worlds-information/

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google’s mission is to store all the world’s information

Exposing Faux Capitalism
November 24, 2009

On March 6, 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on the Charlie Rose program, and made a profound statement about Google’s mission:

Charlie Rose: What was the original mission for Google?

Eric Schmidt: All the world’s information, universally accessible and useful.

Charlie Rose: And how we doing on that?

Eric Schmidt: Well, we’ve just started. And I would tell you that when you are 23 years old and you state that’s your mission, you’ve got a lot of years ahead of you. And Larry and Sergey still have a long way to go in that.

Google stores every single search, along with the IP address of the computer doing the search, and has done so since the beginning.

Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” However, that didn’t stop them from cooperating with the communist Chinese government to further cement The Great Firewall of China, by restricting access to certain information deemed unacceptable by the regime. So much for their commitment to the universally accessible component of their mission.

While it’s falling behind in making the world’s information universally accessible, it’s moving ahead at breakneck speed in storing all the world’s information. This recent article talks about how much Google knows about you, and how their new tool, Google Dashboard, introduced this November, will show you exactly that.

It should be clear that Schmidt wasn’t speaking metaphorically when he said “all the world’s information,” he literally meant it. All the world’s information, stored by Google.