gHacks technology news » google privacy http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Google Dashboard Offers View Of Google Account Usage http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/05/google-dashboard-offers-view-of-google-account-usage/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/05/google-dashboard-offers-view-of-google-account-usage/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:23:51 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=18144 googleGoogle today launched a new service for Google account holders called Google Dashboard. Google Dashboard is a all-in-one dashboard that offers a decent view of a user’s usage of Google services. The dashboard basically lists specific information about data that each Google service has stored for that Google account. This ranges from information about received and send emails in Gmail over the photos, albums and profile at Google Picasa to subscription information in Google Reader and the latest web searches in Google Search.

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.

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/05/google-dashboard-offers-view-of-google-account-usage/feed/ 2 Google Update Turns Open Source http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:39:09 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/ googleGoogle Update is a background program by Google that gets installed if the user installs Google software like Google Pack on a computer system. The program has caused some concern – more so than other background updaters with the exception of ctfmon.exe – because of the frequency that it gets reinstalled and reactivated by Google software on the computer system. The annoyance of seeing the Google Update process appear running over and over again after killing and uninstalling it was not the only concern that many users shared.

It was not transparent which data was transferred to Google servers while running Google Updater; And as the software was running in the background all the time it was probably the major concern that was voiced by users and privacy advocates. Google would not be Google if they could not come up with a solution to those privacy concerns: Their solution was to make Google Updater Open Source so that anyone (well not really anyone but those with the skill and knowledge to do so) could analyse the source in detail to find out about the data connections of the application. Google Updater was released with the codename Omaha at Google Code where it can be publicly downloaded.

Users who are interested in removal instructions can take a look at our article about removing Google Update on the Windows operating system.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/feed/ 5 Chromium Iron http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/25/chromium-iron/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/25/chromium-iron/#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:51:59 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7212 The release of Google Chrome and its Open Source counterpart Chromium put Google for the first time in the position that Microsoft was in for the last ten years or so. Users are looking at Microsoft products with suspicion suspecting privacy breaches and data collection on large scales. This is especially apparent in Microsoft operating systems where tools have been developed that turn off features that communicate with Microsoft servers.

It is a known fact that Google is collecting a massive amount of data. The main part stems from searches conducted on the search engine but other tools like the Google Toolbar add to that. Google on the other hand did not release a software until now that became such a center of criticism. Privacy advocates focused their criticism on two aspects of the Google Chrome browser.

The first was the unique user Id that was generated which could theoretically identify a user. The second that everything that was entered in the browser’s address bar was transmitted to Google even if the user never submitted the text to the search engine.

Several minor objections have come to light in the past week and software developers started to develop solutions that would eliminate identification and data transfers unless they were necessary.

Iron (vie Download Squad) was developed from the Open Source browser Chromium. That’s something that Google did encourage and the developers were the first to provide a version of Chromium that was stripped down of all known data collection and privacy problems: The client-ID, timestamp, suggest functionality, alternate error pages, error reporting, rlz-tracking, google updater and url tracker have been removed.

The functionality on the other hand remains the same. The only problem that could arise is if developers cannot keep up with the development pace of the Chromium browser. As of now this is the recommended release for users with privacy concerns.

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