Transparency, choice and control? Well, two out of three ain’t bad…

Criticisms of Google data aggregation and privacy policies abound.  In hopes of stemming some of that negative press, Google recently announced the Google Dashboard, to “offers a simple view into the data associated with your account.”

True, the Dashboard gives you choice (easy to turn off accounts you had forgotten you had) and control (easy to turn off access to your Google account from other Web sites).  But it is hardly the transparency that most critics call for.  In fact, it doesn’t offer any information that you didn’t already know.  All the information in the new Dashboard can be found at your existing manage accounts page and more complete browsing history can be found in your browser.  Many products – Groups, Checkout, Analytics, AdSense and AdWords among them – Dashboard simply punts you over to that tool’s settings page.

Dashboard may save you a few clicks, but it hardly decreases the opacity of Google’s data aggregation.

It may be of more interest to users of Gmail since the Big-G has access to the entire contents of your inbox.  But Gmail users already knew this because Google is posting ads relevant to their emails.  I don’t use Gmail but will update this post when I convince my wife to let me look at her Dashboard.

Now that would be transparency!  But don’t hold your breath...