Google Gives in to Privacy Concerns

Google's (GOOG) leaders have always had something of a tin ear when it comes to apprehending how afraid people are of its power and ubiquity. Ken Auletta's new book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, has a case in point. When the company's engineers rolled out Gmail, they were delighted to announce that each user had virtually unlimited memory storage, so no one had to delete e-mail to free up space. Why, they asked themselves, do we need a delete function? After all, it just clutters up the page and distracts people.

In a classic case of thinking like an engineer, the Googlers had no idea that the public would be appalled at this. People were already spooked at the idea that a Google bot would be scanning their e-mails, looking for keywords to pin ads next to. They had to have control over their private communication, advisers warned Google's leaders. Astonishingly, Larry Page responded by saying, "We want them to start thinking differently."

That didn't last long. The Electronic Privacy Information Center called for Gmail to be shut down as a threat to basic Internet privacy, and the befuddled engineers had to restore the delete function. Unless people can control how much personal information Google collects, it seemed, they would regard the company as Big Brother.

Today, Google debuts its latest effort to mollify such privacy concerns. The company has launched Google Dashboard, a navigable list of all the information (search terms, YouTube videos you watched, etc.) that it has collected about you. From now on, users can look over all the personal data they've inadvertently shared with Google, delete anything that makes them uncomfortable, and change privacy settings to limit Google's, shall we say, curiosity. Here's a little film that shows how Dashboard works.