How does this work? Using the IP address you provide to us, our automated system can determine your broad geographic location. If you log in using a remote IP address, our system will flag it for you. So if you normally log into your account from your home in California and then a few hours later your account is logged in from France, you’ll get a notice like the one above at the top of your Dashboard page – alerting you to the change and providing links for more details. [via]

Google has now rolled out the feature to all Google services, and will display suspicious account activity in the Google Dashboard.

This means that they now check the IP address in all Google services and not only Gmail, a useful change that adds to the security of the account.

google dashboard

Two links are provided in the notification message, details opens a small popup with additional information about the account activity listing the location, IP address and date and time. The alert can be ignored or closed in this popup. The other option is to change the Google Account password, an option that is also provided directly in the initial notification message.

The only problem with this service is that most users probably do not access the dashboard regularly, if at all. It would be great if the feature would be activated for all Google services so that the suspicious account activity would be displayed right there. Up until then it might be wise to visit the Google Dashboard regularly to check the account.

A lot of information are displayed in Google Dashboard many with links to the services to look and manage the information. It is likely that a lot of Google users will be surprised at the wealth of information that are displayed in Google Dashboard.

Probably even more useful than the display of the data are links to various privacy policies and options to clear or manage the data that gets stored in the accounts. It is for example possible to use a link to remove items or clear the web history, manage privacy settings in Orkut or Google Reader, manage Gmail https settings or manage Blogger blogs.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. 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. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Google Dashboard is definitely an interesting concept to manage many privacy related tasks from one central interface. Users who want to try it out to see the data that is stored in their Google account can visit the Google Dashboard website directly. (via official Google Blog and Connected Internet.