• Los Angeles Times et al, Thursday, November 5, 2009 3:10 PM

In the name of transparency, Google has launched a Dashboard service, which is essentially a page where users can get a sense of all the data it stores about them in any of 23 different Google-run services. Despite the approval of privacy advocates, industry watchers seem less than impressed.

The LA Timescouches the move by saying that "questions about how the company uses consumer data continue to mount," before shooting it down thusly: "Though much of the concern about Google's data storage revolves around precisely how and what the company does to analyze and profit from user information, the Dashboard offers little insight into those domains."

Rather, the service tries to confront consumer concerns by giving them a clearer view into how their data is stored and used by programs like Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs.

Yet, as GigaOm writes: "What's scariest about Google isn't the fact that it has all my email, YouTube, Maps and web searches, but how it can farm that data to discover more about me (and how long it keeps it) ... People know they have Gmail accounts -- what they don't know is which Google demographics are sold to advertisers based on that history."

And the Times' Bits blog notes, "Much of the information was previously available in the accounts and settings sections for each product, so Dashboard simply brings all that information together in one place." Despite that fact, it quotes one privacy analyst who applauds the effort as a step in right direction.

Under the headline, "Google Dashboard Offers 'Unprecedented' View of Stuff We Already Knew," Digital Daily writes, "It's not quite the extraordinary achievement Google would have us believe ... Noticably [sic] absent from Dashboard is any view of the cookie data that Google uses to target ads."

Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times et al »