Google touts privacy boost with new Dashboard

Google on Thursday launched its "Dashboard," a tool for giving users of its services an all-in-one view of their personal information tied to the various Google services they use.

Google Dashboard is being touted as a way for users to, at a glance, see information about their Web usage, email usage and more when they are logged into Google services such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Calendar. Google provides an overview of the Dashboard in a video in its main blog. Dashboard will let users delete information as well, a move that could help to address privacy concerns that have been raised surrounding Google's collection of so much data about its users' online habits.

Also from Network World: 10 Cool Things You Didn't Know About Google

On its blog, Google trumpets the new offering's arrival: "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..."

Google says it has offered other privacy tools in the past, including Data Liberation Front, which enables users to move data in and out of Google services.