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How to find out what Google knows about you

By Barry Collins

Posted on 5 Nov 2009 at 10:31

Search giant Google is coming clean over the amount of personal data it holds on its users.

Dubbed Google Dashboard, the service allows users to log in and find all the personal information held about them in Google's myriad applications, including Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and several more.

The Dashboard gives a highly detailed, application-by-application breakdown of what's stored in your account. Gmail, for example, includes full transcripts of archived web chats and logs of the most recent messages in key folders.

Web History, meanwhile, shows full details of searches made across all of Google's services, including images, Maps and the regular web search. It allows users to wipe their entire search history from the Dashboard screen.

Users of Google Latitude, the service that broadcasts your current position to approved contacts, are also shown the last destination logged.

Much, if not all, of this information has been made available previously through the individual applications. However, this is the first time Google has collated the data into a single screen.

Google says Dashboard is designed to offer users "greater transparency and control over their data".

"The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard," the company claims on the Google blog.

You can log in to your Google Dashboard here.

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User comments

Bad, Good & Worrying

it's rather bad that Google logs stores and no doubt uses such a large & detailed amount of what is (or should be) personal info
Good that they are at least honest about what they hold and have now (seemingly) made it very easy to check and more importantly remove by the individual. Although I notice the article states 'search history' - what about the rest of the data?
However, I can't help wondering what data other organisations are keeping with regard to a persons web activities - Wasn't there a recent ruling that requires data to be kept for a minimum time?

By greemble on 5 Nov 2009

I checked my google dashboard and to be honest, google knows my @gmail.com email address. great.....

By DaChimp on 5 Nov 2009

Deletable???

Very few options to 'delete all the information'
But better than most companies.

By briley on 6 Nov 2009

Part of the 'price' for 'free' services is you have to put up with this obsessional hoarding of data. At least Google has been open (a decade after starting to collect it!). Hate to think how much data is stored by Tesco.

By davidsoap on 6 Nov 2009

I think you should have noted that this doesn't touch the server logs, apparently they get anonymized by "removing part of the IP address (after 9 months) and cookie information (after 18 months)" so don't assume you're free and clear now :)

By pinero50 on 6 Nov 2009

I can't see any section marked "Web History" or similar that would allow me to delete my search history (if I wanted to).

By halsteadk on 6 Nov 2009

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