The Dashboard page, accessible at google.com/dashboard, gives you an overview of calendars or documents you share, your chat history, and sites you've authorized to access your Picasa pictures or Gmail contacts (such as a social networking site that can use your contact list to help you find other users, à la Facebook). You'll also find a list of search queries you've performed while logged in to Google. If you use the Google Toolbar and have enabled the Web history feature, you'll see your browsing history, too.

If seeing so much personal information stored on Google servers makes you un­­easy, you can clear it or stop sharing it. Click Remove items or clear Web history, and remove some or all search terms. If you wipe your search slate clean, Google will assume that you want to opt out of saving such data, and it will automatically stop doing so. You can tell Gmail to stop saving your chat history, and decide whether YouTube can use your Google account info to target ads.

Google hasn't created any new privacy features or options for Dashboard; it has just made them easier to find. And faster, effortless control over our personal data is clearly a good thing. "It's definitely progress," says Ari Schwartz of the , a consumer and privacy advocacy group.

But Dashboard is no privacy panacea. For one thing, it allows access to saved data tied to a Google account, but not to information (such as saved searches) tied to the unique identifier within a cookie. Google that says doing so would raise additional privacy concerns, because while logging in to a Google account verifies a person's identity, you have no such login option for a cookie. And allowing anyone sitting at a PC to see all of the searches tied to a cookie currently on that PC could reveal plenty of sensitive information.