Danny was kind enough to ping me about this story, which breaks the news about Google’s new “Dashboard,” which is, in essence, a first start toward realizing the “privacy dashboard” I asked for so long ago (and again here), back when I was posting ideas like a madman (I’m going to be doing that again shortly, so watch out…).
It’s a big deal I think, even if most of us never use it. And it’s very smart of Google to lead here. It really had no choice, when you think about it. And it’s kind of cool to see stuff I wrote about here over three years ago happen in the real world.
I like the look of it but not sure it offers me anything really needed or useful. Maybe it’s one of those things you just need to use first.
I always delete my cookies + don’t allow Google profiles to spy on me, so this is a non-issue for me.
My guess is that I’m in the minority on this?
🙂 nmw
Collect everything in one tidy place for phishing attacks/hackers, jealous S.O.s, employers, untoward acquaintances, general password/security glitches?
sure, a brilliant step forward in terms of privacy protection!!
Hi John,
I understand where your ideally coming from, but one, most people won’t actually visit it, what substantial utility does it provide for the average user over the specific history tools in the different services?
Secondly, I think it’s far more of case of a matter of marketing and corporate/legal positioning on googles part so they can say that they enable people access, knowledge and ‘editing’ (it’s actually been the law in many parts of the world for many years: access to data held on you).
Thirdly, and actually most importantly, you saw that story a few weeks back about the email/password lists being dumped publicly. Consider all the times phishing exercises and data-dumps/leaks aren’t ever revealed, now imagine the simplicity of essentially finding everything about you: a medical injury search, youtube (inc. embedded) video (that might enable drilling down deeper to find truly embarrassing peccadilloes) or latitude/Lbs coordinates (inc. via the ads) at one single touch-point.
Anyone who knows the most basic thing about security knows you don’t put everything in one egg, and that’s exactly what google is doing here – a simple brute-force attack would open up the caverns.
What I’d actually like is for the option to turn off access to this right now in my settings without/until further hurdles, or some pay-related verification, because anything else will be paper-thin protection, and get even worse as google/services evolve (e.g. what happens when a completely bound self-contained and tied to google google-phone comes in, or when Android becomes available on STB’s and provide data-feeds back to google? improbabilities? We’re talking about the Internets greatest data-hourder here!
The practical aspects to think about.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
Love your blog! Keep up the excellent work!!
COMMON CENTS
http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
ps. Link Exchange?