What does Google know about you? Its new privacy dashboard should reveal all
The new mobile-friendly version of Google Dashboard is rolling out this week.
Google has made its new Dashboard, on the right, more mobile friendly.
Image: GoogleGoogle is rolling out an update to the Google dashboard with new features and a redesign aimed at making it easier to use on mobile.
The Dashboard is the place where Google shows users a snapshot of the Google services they use and what data it's collecting, such as Maps location history, photos stored, search history, and YouTube history.
Dashboard launched in 2009 but until now hasn't had a mobile version, making it difficult to use. The current page, designed for the desktop, is shown above on the left and contains a lot of small text and links with no obvious way to download data that Google has collected.
The new page in the right-hand image has larger logos for Google products, prioritizes popular products, and offers a link at the top of the page from where users can download all their data.
Previously the link to Google's Takeout site where users can download their data was available in My Account, but not the dashboard.
Google says it wanted to integrate Dashboard better with its tools like My Account and My Activity.
The redesign is also meant to make it easier to get an overview of Google products used and personal data in each of them. The most important part of the redesign was to "improve usability on touchscreens", said Google in a blogpost.
The company is rolling out the redesigned Dashboard in the coming days.
Google also suggests people are actually using the privacy control features it's providing.
The Takeout download feature launched in 2011, and since then Google says people have downloaded over one exabyte -- or a billion gigabytes -- of data from the service.
Google's billion-plus users are creating a million exports per month. Takeout currently supports exports directly to Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox and soon Google will add Box and other options too.
Also, "tens of millions" of people have used Google's Privacy Checkup feature since it launched as part of My Account in 2015. My Account has "hundreds of millions" of visitors a year, according to Google.
Google launched My Activity last year and claims 150 million people have used it to find content they'd previously found through a Google search.
Zero Day Zdnet.com