Google today announced the latest offering – Google Dashboard. In a blog post, Google offered this new feature to the general public stating its continuous endeavor for transparency, choice and control. Everybody is praising this as “Don’t be evil” Google. But I don’t see it as much of “Don’t be evil” thing. Google is claiming to provide the information it knows about you through the medium of dashboard. But this dashboard doesn’t contain much of the real knowledge Google collects about a person. It’s just showing some tidbits like number of emails in Gmail, number of documents in Docs, reader stats, YouTube videos you have watched and all other such google services you are using. But is that the real information or knowledge google has about you?
As a search engine, google knows much more about ‘You’ than you can imagine. It keeps learning about your habbits, your shopping patterns, your interests, your secrets you have given them through the search terms and much more. What dashboard offers is raw informaion and not so useful to you, but what google collects is knowledge from the information it processes through all the means when you use any of the google products (including search). I’ve done artificial intelligence projects in my college and also had chance to work on Knowledge Based Engineering, and that’s why I claim – this is not what it seems to be – Transparency, choice and control.
