Google Dashboard: This is a brief of how much Google knows about you | Hacker News Reader

Google Dashboard: This is a brief of how much Google knows about you

google.com

92 pointsmarkbao59 comments

You're forgetting one way more important thing: logs. Your access patterns to Google's sites is way more important than the information you see on this dashboard; based on your access patterns, most of the information in that dashboard can be predicted anyway.

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Sounds like they have no intention of sharing the logs or cookie-related data either. We're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized and not actually linked back to our google accounts.

Thanks, I just went and deleted all my google cookies!

Are you aware of flash cookies?

There's a Firefox extension BetterPrivacy that will delete your Flash cookies automagically.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623

Does Google use flash cookies?

We're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized

Actually Google fought in court to make sure that it didn't have to anonymize its logs, ever. So it's a safe bet to assume that your logs are not anonymized.

I've also got that impression, partially from this answer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LVSnoJZHmM#t=21m33s

According to the page linked in the parent:

We anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months) and cookie information (after 18 months).

Sorry, I wasn't clear. After 18 months, they don't keep the original IP anymore, that is correct, but they can still cross-reference everything. Which means that in practice, they can still figure out who you are, they haven't lost any "connectivity" of the data.

But to make regulators happy, after 18 months, they can't spit out your raw IP addresses. Feel better now?

That makes me wonder what "anonymous" actually means. As I understand it, Google anonymizing the logs in fact means they don't store any information that can lead directly back to you: as in, based on a single log file, they couldn't say who you are.

In the greater context of things, however, it is not anonymous: based on your previous access patterns, and your current (< 18 months) access patterns, they could link your anonymized logs with your unanonymized logs. Is that still anonymous then ?

This all reminds me of some research from Germany I heard about a few years ago: basically, if you have someone's ZIP code, age, gender and education, you can get a > 99% accuracy resolving who this person is in real life.

To riff on that: i chat with friends on gmail. For a few of them, I've input their phone numbers into the gmail chat interface so that chats will be sent as SMS when they're not online. A few of them use GOOG411 frequently for directory assistance. Now google, if they care, can draw from the data of a user's GOOG411 calls, to feed them more relevant ads on their site.

There are other places where Google gathers lots of information about you: blogspot, youtube, all sites using Google Analytics, all sites serving Adsense ads, all sites serving doubleclick ads, all sites using Google Analytics.

So:

Clear your cookies.

Use tor.

Don't forget about flash cookies.

Don't forget that your computer's real time clock skew can reveal it's identity. By examining packets sent from it.

Funny times to live?

Also, the Ghostery Firefox plugin is supposed to be good for blocking Google Analytics and similar services.

Why is that a problem that Google knows about you? Google knows about me a lot, and I think it's a good thing, because: 1) I might be found by relevant people. 2) It adds up to my reputation, for example it may help to send email and have it delivered, because I look like a real person.

What are the downsides of Google watching you/me?

Yes, there are advantages being known online.

But we are not talking about about search results. We are talking about wide and not controlled by us stream of data stored somewhere.

Risks for a user?

For example exploiting one's weaknesses by, in most trivial case, serving her ads or search results tailored to push her to make desired action.

I, personally, prefer to build my online image by taking my own conscious actions, not by data hungry algorithm running by corporation which goal is to maximize shareholder's value.

Edit: added missing not in first paragraph

I logged in thinking there wouldn't be very much on me, since I had disabled web history when the feature first came out.

It seems to have "reactivated" itself around October 2009 for some reason. Also, despite google telling me they only collect web searches, my history for image, news, and video searches are also included.

Now I feel slightly uncomfortable.

More importantly they also know which urls you visit for the sites that display google ads / use google analytics.

Woah! Just checked it and discovered that my personal calendar was public. This has been helpful already.

Under Account I clicked on "Websites authorized to access the account" and saw that clickpass had access to my Google Contacts. Why do they need access to that?

> Why do they need access to that?

I think it may have something to do with making money.

I saw that as well. No idea when I approved that one...

Logging in to HN using Google prompted me to give Clickpass access to Google Contacts. Logging into StackOverflow with Google doesn't do that, so maybe Clickpass is using an old/weird method of Google auth?

Wow it is really sobering to see how much information one company has. Now imagine this spread across all the businesses you interact with on a daily basis.

> sobering to see how much information one company has

> Now imagine

Uhm - have you ever checked your credit report?

The credit reporting agencies don't actually verify any of that information, so most of it is junk. Apparently my "legal name" is "Johnathon Rockway". Yeah...

> don't actually verify any of that information,

> so most of it is junk

How is this a logical progression? And does google "verify" any of its information?

Google collects its own information, so it is in control of the quality. When you pull someone's credit report, you don't know if what's listed is entirely accurate, and you don't know what it's omitting. So there is a difference.

They should add delete buttons to all listed services which remove the service and content or at least reset everything to the default empty state.

"Oh the better to advertise to you my pretty"

I'm not sure it should be that easy - if you left that page open and walked away for one second someone could delete all of your mail, calendars, documents, pictures, blog posts... the works.

Also related, Google's Data Liberation Front: http://www.dataliberation.org/

"The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products."

They provide information on how to "escape" from a particular service ie. download/migrate data from that service. However, I can't find any indication of whether there is a way to permanently delete all your data from their servers.

That's a Good Thing. Ever spent a year adding data to a site (like oh, say, Stumbleupon) only to notice that there's no way to get your work out? I did. DL lets you export to several other blogformats. That's much cooler.

I find it interesting that there is so much redundant and conflicting information in there. Mine has 3 different addresses, from the last three places I lived (and hadn't updated).

I understand that they are all different services, but since they're all controlled by Google, why not add something to sync them? I'm pretty comfortable with all the information that's up there, so why not have the information constant, and leave the privacy settings down in the individual applications?

Even on a laptop with English versions of Windows and Firefox and my Google accounts language set to English, it still displays that page in Chinese.

What a terrible design choice, assuming the intent is to make it easy for users to see how much of their personal information is out there.

For anybody frustrated by this behavior, the way to force it into English is to append ?hl=en to the end of the URL.

Microsoft should come out with a similar service. I could use it as my homepage. Then I would have a blank page when I open up my browser.

A while back, I did everything I could to clear my YouTube account settings. Something I did apparently broke their code, and now YouTube viewing history is disabled.

There is no option to disable YouTube viewing history in the preferences on either YouTube or Google, but somehow, thankfully, YouTube no longer records my video history. :)

I scroll and I scroll and still not at the bottom!

Apparently I use Google a scary amount :D

I'd be more interested in knowing what Google's ad server (doubleclick) knows about me.

And I block doubleclick in my hosts file. All this paranoia is starting to pay off!

Back when I worked at Doubleclick, the answer was "not much". We were not legally allowed to store your IP address, for example. (But, of course, we could store the md5 hash of your IP address. I love the legal system.)

I am more worried about Analytics, which provides details of everything you do on nearly every site on the Internet to one centralized source. Needless to say, this is the reason why I have NoScript installed.

Analytics has the same restrictions on storing or using PII (personally identifiable information). None of that gets linked with your account.

I don't have a google account. Could someone describe what is listed if you do?

Basically, all the Google services you subscribed to, like Gmail, Alerts, Blogger, Youtube, Calendar, Docs, Health, how many Picasa Web Albums uploaded, what is your recent favorite Youtube video, recent Task, or your recent Web History (disabled for me).

Thanks. It's kind of surprising I've managed to avoid all that stuff. ;)

Did they forget a staging link ? http://img.skitch.com/20091105-bk6g841s7gwags3y84ksf9gtgi.pn...

Hmm. Some of these searches definitely aren't mine. I wonder if I'm signed in on my mom's computer or something... These date back quite a bit.

looks over shoulder

yea, me too. all of these searches about burning sensations while peeing.. i mean, uhh...;)

I don't have any information about any searches I've done on google.com (and I definitely have done them!). Is there something special I need to do to see that info?

Ah I see, something called "Google Web History" exists to explicitly track your searches. I never knew this before, and I'm glad I'm not signed up!

Not much interesting about me. I am happy not to have relied too much on Google for the last decade. God knows it can be difficult sometimes. Temptation is high.

I use Google products, but not that much. The simple point is to: opt out of what you don't need. I use GMail, predominantly, and beyond that don't have much other information associated with my account.

Privacy online isn't threatened by Google ... so much as it is by PEBKAC. ;-)

This was discussed earlier today at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923355

This makes me glad I don't use Google products!

Yeah. I can't believe Google has the calendar entries I typed into Google Calendar. They could show up at my next dental appointment and serve me a targeted advertisement!

you ought-ta work for google.

Great, that reminded me to remove something I apparently put on my Google Products wishlist in 2005(?)

Nice, except google hasn't learnt how to do internationalization yet.

I use(d) only Google Docs, and it tells me "Detailed information from this service is unavailable at this time." Absolutely typical, which is why I abandoned it for other collaborative file sharing tools. Also I hit my "share quota" whatever that is. Typical of Google toys - not ready for a production environment. I know its free, but I can pay for real tools that don't fail me randomly (or as much anyway). Sigh. Didn't mean to rant. Sorry.

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