• Cyber999
• CyberSAFE First Aid
• Speaker Request
• Request to Exhibit
• Contact Us
• Links

       By : Mohamad Nizam Kassim

In our daily lives, easier access to the information and improved methods of communication has significantly helped us on our various tasks. The right combination of free, easy-to-use services along with targeted advertising has made numerous online companies emerged to offer such services. One of them is Google.

Learn how to manage your google privacy!

The Google Dashboard allows you to view and control data associated with the different products you use with your Google Account.

Google is a global organisation with at least 159 international domains around the globe and is available in more than 112 languages. Google’s noble mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible to everyone”. With that mission, Google offers high quality and innovative products and often for free. Hundred millions of internet users, currently, rely on Google for information, communications and other tasks on many aspects of their daily lives. The best example is Google Maps. All of us find that Google Maps has significant useful on searching and finding the location as well as the suggested route to the specific destination.

However, these online services have tremendous amount of our personal information about us. This article is intended to increase our awareness on using Google online services and perhaps may be shocked by just know how much Google know about you.

Just Google It!

Interestingly, we often hear that people says to their friend who ask questions on whatever stuff they wanted to know with ‘Just Google It’. In 2006, the Oxford English dictionary included the word ‘google’ as verb and since then it became a household word and has been widely use by everybody on the earth.

Besides as search engine, Google offers a wide array of applications, language translation, data storage, email, mapping, and online office application. Moreover, Google never stops to develop innovative products as well as improving user experience on their existing services. That makes Google unique and attractive to the internet users around the world.

For instance, when we misspelled the keyword, Google will suggest the right keyword with correct spelling - this feature is called Did You Mean. Some people would say quite an awesome feature to have while search information on the internet. This feature is as a result of data retention of users’ queries for several years from millions of people misspelled the specific words.

Google has carefully gather information through several primary vectors for their research and development activities – new service development and existing services enhancement as well as not to mention their targeted advertising program.

No Such Things as Free Lunch

Most people think their using free online services at zero cost. Think again.

All online services require us to sign up to these services. Therefore, we pay with our personal information in exchange of using these online services for free.  If we consider our online activities - searching information, mapping, communicating, blogging, and news reading, shopping and browsing - we have revealed quite comprehensive profile of ourselves to Google. Google has informal motto among their employee - Don’t be Evil.  It is reflected that how much data they have about us.

In order to understand the amount of potential data that has been disclosed to Google, please refer to Table 1 -Google Online Services: A Closer Look on Privacy Concern. This table indicates the potential information disclosure when you are engaging with Google     online services. The more information you have disclose the greater information disclosure risk.

Don’t panic! Google offer the privacy tool called Google Dashboard to manage your online activities while using their services.  It can be found at this URL: www.google.com/dashboard.  Google dashboard provides the summary of accounts that we have sign in with Google such as Gmail, Youtube, Docs etc. It also provides the amount of the data associated with these services. We can manage our information that has been disclosed to Google from time to time.

Summary

Currently, Google never misuse the information that they had in their possession to malicious purposes. However, Google is bound by rules and regulation of country in which they operates and shareholders decision. The potential risk of our stockpile of information to be leaked to other people is possible in future.

With that in mind, we need to aware on our personal information when we sign in to the free online services. It is not we must avoid using these online services but rather managing our privacy on the internet.

Table 1 - Google Online Services: A Closer Look on Privacy Concern