My strange Google Dashboard entries

Google Dashboard continues to show some strange entries, months after I cancelled all my blogs and Adsense accounts, and severed my ties with many other Google products.
   I’d advise others to take a look at theirs and make sure they aren’t on services that they never signed up for. This went well beyond Google Wave and the privacy débâcles of early 2010.
   Here’s a relatively new entry on my Google Dashboard (left). After confirming that my Adsense account was shut, it insists I still have an account to one of the most poorly conceived ad programmes I have ever encountered. In fact, it says I have two products with it, which is news to me. I never applied more than once and that was for this blog, back in March 2009.
   On January 14, 2010, Google wrote to me in an email: ‘Thank you for taking the time to write to us. As per your request, we have permanently closed your AdSense account.’
   According to this new entry on the Dashboard, you haven’t—and Adsense remains among my Google products in ‘My Account’. I thought something was fishy when I first noticed that it did not drop back to ‘Try something new’ in January.
   Giving Google the benefit of the doubt, I signed in to my non-existent Adsense account and received this message:

I’d love to know what that application is and under what address I used, but, as I said, I believe this is a complete work of fiction, like Google claiming to support free speech or the presumption of innocence. I know for a fact that that’s bogus.
   At left is the other one, which probably turned me more anti-Google than anything else. Blogger. I no longer have any blogs on the service, and logging in to my old Blogger Dashboard confirms this. Well, they aren’t too good at mathematics down in Mountain View, because 0 equals 4 there. Surely it doesn’t take months for the Blogger count on the Google Dashboard to catch up? They are owned by the same company, after all.
   Finally, in the ‘No s***, Sherlock’ file is this one at left. There had better be no contacts in Talk, considering I never signed up to this service (oh, it appears in ‘My Products’, too).
   Do pop in to your Google account if you have one, and just cast a cursory glance down the page. Head in to your Dashboard to see what data Google holds. Hopefully you won’t have as many weird entries as I do.


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