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You are hereGoogle's Schmidt: "Because we say so" on why you can trust Google's Privacy Dashboard
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2009-11-06 17:16
In discussing Google's new "Privacy Dashboard," Fox Business' Neil Cavuto asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the ability to delete private information.
Not being one to accept Google's legendary PR spin without a grain of skepticism, lets review the real significance of Google's new "Privacy Dashboard." First, to be fair to Google, the privacy dashboard is indeed an incremental improvement over what Google users had before, because it aggregates what was in 21 different places before, into a single more convenient "dashboard."
Second, this "dashboard" was exceptionally easy for Google to produce. All it basically does is insert a new front-end web navigation page -- to more easily find other existing Google webpages -- much like any website home page offers navigation to pages behind it.
Third, Google completely left out of the dashboard, both the lions share of the private information that Google collects and the most intimate private information that Google collects: i.e. their search, click, and surfing histories which indicate what they want, value, read, and view.
Lastly, Google has cleverly "solved" the problem for users the way Google defines the problem. Google clearly is saying all the right "words" that users want to hear: "transparency," "choice" and "control."
In sum, Google users who care about protecting their privacy are not looking for one single dashboard to see all the private information that is being collected on them, but are looking for one single brake to put a stop to Google's open-ended collection of private information on them.
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