What Google Knows About You?

Nowadays privacy is very important. Its becoming harder and harder to save your privacy. Facebook, twitter, plurk... All these so friendly sites collect data about every user. Lets say about internet giant Google. It provides a lot of useful products. The more Google services you use, the more data it collects about everything you do: search history, email data, your blogs, videos you watch on YouTube, your calendar appointments and even shopping lists. Besides yesterday Google bought Gizmo5. So your privacy is gonna be killed!

But there is nice place where you can check out what Google knows about you. Its called Google Dashboard. The Dashboard is only for Google products where your Google account is used. So Dashboard lists data associated with your Google account. But cookie-based data that Google collects through ads is not included in Dashboard. If you want to be private with it go to the Ad Preferences Manager and disable google.com/ads/preferences.

Dashboard give you more transparency and control. You can delete your data and change settings. For some of products, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of your data. So every time you sign up with new service read attentively terms and conditions. Remember gold rule: "Being private you can always become public. But never vice versa"