“In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard,” the company explained in a blog post. “Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.”

And it does do that, offering a nice single view of all of the data associated with our Google accounts. That said, it’s not quite the extraordinary achievement Google would have us believe.

I suppose it is true that “the scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented,” as Google claims. That said, it doesn’t offer much in the way of new information. Noticeably absent from Dashboard is any view of the cookie data Google uses to target ads. Essentially, all Dashboard does is consolidate the admin pages of the services associated with a user’s account in a single place. Convenient, yes. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know? Or, more importantly, how Google is using that information? No.

Priced at about $36 per user per year, iNotes is cheaper than Google’s (GOOG) Apps Premier Edition offering, which costs about $50 per user per year. And while it might not offer as many bells and whistles (IBM’s 1GB of storage is significantly less than the 25GB that Google provides), IBM (IBM) claims it more than makes up for it in security, reliability and privacy.

“We run the world’s most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities,” said Sean Poulley, IBM’s vice president of online collaboration services. “It’s fair to say we’re pretty trusted….Candidly, Google has shown itself to be weak….There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service. We’re bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition.”

An impressive number when you consider that Apple (AAPL) employs only 40 full-time reviewers and requires at least two of them to scrutinize each app–or so says Apple’s reply to the Federal Communication Commission inquiry into why Google’s (GOOG) Google Voice hasn’t yet made it into the App Store.

That said, the volume of approved apps does make you wonder about just how thoroughly they’re are being vetted. Reviewers are charged with checking apps for buggy software, content and privacy violations and anything that “degrades the core experience of the iPhone,” among other things. For a team of 40 people to review and approve 1,394 apps based on these criteria, and presumably reject a few others, in a single workday seems at least a bit miraculous–unless, of course, someone accidentally hit the “Bulk Approve” button.

The Open Book Alliance formally launched the manifesto this past week with which it’s challenging Google’s settlement with authors and publishers. The organization now has a Web site and quite an array of allies–which include, of course, Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). And as if Google doesn’t have enough on its plate, turns out that all along, Microsoft has been holding regular “Screw Google” meetings, the bastards. Uh, I thought that’s what people pay good money to learn in Business School. On a happier note, Howard Stern fans everywhere were happy to learn that Sirius XM (SIRI) has debuted a device that can turn an iPhone or iPod touch into a full-fledged satellite radio.

Over in Personal Technology, Walt reviewed Snow Leopard and found it to be an improvement on its predecessor, but with a lot of the upgrades under the hood invisible to most users. Not the typical object of desire we’re trained to expect out of Apple. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answers reader email about choosing a vendor to buy a computer online and setting parental controls in Firefox. In The Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret explores the trials and tribulations of BlackBerry and iPhone users switching one for the other.

More next week.

An interesting variation on the “membership drive” and one that’s gotten Tagged in hot water with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy.”

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical–and illegal–behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged, for its part, claims this is all just a big misunderstanding. In a statement of its own, the company denied abusing its users’ personal address books, saying, essentially, it had their consent to do so.

“When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our ‘invite your friends’ language was confusing,” said Tagged CEO Greg Tseng. “…In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends.”

Oh, and next time you register for a social network, be sure to read its Terms of Service–especially the portions that are presented in ALL CAPS. They might be important. From Tagged’s Terms of Service:

“E) Notice Regarding Commercial Email

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM TAGGED, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY TAGGED FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.”

It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google (GOOG), which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience.

The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause. Because when it is finally launched, Chrome OS will be yet one more deep well of consumer data to which Google will have access.

There are already quite a few such wells, including Google Search and Chrome, that profile user interests and surfing habits: Gmail, which gives the company access to our email conversations, and Google Voice, which gives the company access to our spoken ones. Add to this Google Street View and Latitude, a service that tracks the physical location of its users, and mobile and desktop operating systems and, well…that kind of consolidation of Internet-based services around a single dominant company should give us all pause.

Lest we forget, Google is in the behavioral targeting business. Why would people ever use an OS developed by a company whose business is based on meticulously recording and analyzing their online behavior? Because they enjoy using its other services, I suppose. But there is a privacy-vs-ease-of-use tradeoff here. And with Chrome OS, it is unprecedented. Further, while Google might tout its “don’t be evil” motto as reason enough to trust the company with our data, there are other entities that don’t always share that sensibility. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that the federal government tried to force Google to turn over user search data to the Justice Department…

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, echoed Rotenberg’s concerns. “Google’s new OS has to be placed under the data collection X-Ray by US and EU privacy regulators and advocates,” he said. “Any expansion into the marketplace by either Google or Microsoft should generate intense scrutiny, especially for the privacy implications. These two are engaged in a global data collections digital arms race, which has far-reaching implications for consumers and their information.”

The Obama administration is no longer using Google’s (GOOG) video player to deliver the President’s weekly addresses online. Instead, it will use an Akamai (AKAM) player. No reason has yet been given for the abrupt switch, although some speculate it was inspired by privacy concerns over the video-sharing site.

As many privacy advocates noted when the White House first began relying on it, YouTube uses cookies that can track visitors even if they never actually play the video. “Whenever you follow a link, or download an embedded or off-site resource, your browser sends a referer header (sic) that tells the Web site what Web page you came from,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains. “And whenever you load any document, your browser may send cookies that show whether you’ve visited the same site before, and that may even identify you directly. For instance, if you’re logged into YouTube and you watch an embedded YouTube video on some other site, YouTube can still recognize you because your browser will still send a personalized YouTube cookie. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when–even if you didn’t try to play the video.”

And this was the case with the President’s weekly addresses as delivered via YouTube. Not an ideal situation for the administration, and one that it quickly sought to remedy. Shortly after the initial outcry over the issue, the White House rolled out a technical fix that limited that tracking ability only to those who watched the President’s weekly address. But that was really just a band-aid. This latest move seems far more definitive, as the Akamai player uses no tracking cookies whatsoever.

UPDATE: The White House says it has not abandoned YouTube. It’s simply testing a new player.

“As the president continues his goal of making government more accessible and transparent, this week we tested a new way of presenting the president’s weekly address by using a player developed in-house,” a White House spokesman said in a statement. “This decision is more about better understanding our internal capabilities than it is a position on third-party solutions or a policy. The weekly address was also published in third-party video hosting communities and we will likely continue to embed videos from these services on WhiteHouse.gov in the future.”

Integrated into Google’s iGoogle platform, PowerMeter works with the so-called “smart grid” to show a granular, real-time view of electricity-consuming devices–the theory being that seeing your energy usage makes it easier to reduce it.

“Our lack of knowledge about our own energy usage is a huge problem, but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and fight global warming by reducing our power usage,” the company explains. “Studies show that access to your household’s personal energy information is likely to save you between 5–15% on your monthly bill, and the potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting. For every six households that save 10% on electricity, for instance, we reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one conventional car off the road.”

Like many Google (GOOG) initiatives, PowerMeter is giddy with change-the-world altruism. And change the world it may. But like many Google initiatives, there’s a trade-off: the disclosure of increasingly more information about our predilections, our interests and habits to a company that’s amassing a vast data set about customer behavior.

While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

– Rep. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callaghan, Nov. 6, 2007

Yahoo’s public shaming before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last November apparently had quite an effect on Internet companies cooperating with Chinese government censorship and demands for information on dissidents. Less than a year after that brutal Capitol Hill humiliation, during which Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D., Calif.) lambasted Yahoo’s leadership as moral “pygmies,” Yahoo (YHOO), along with Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), is introducing a code of conduct that will govern their business practices in repressive countries. The Global Network Initiative, as it’s called, commits the companies to a general support for freedom of expression on the Internet, requiring them to at least try to “avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression” and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy.”

“The idea is that we believe the guidelines will need to be reviewed, and we will have to revise them as we take into account the actual experience,” said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, which helped draft the initiative. “It envisions an ongoing process of learning and sharing best practices.”

That’s a great step forward for firms like Google, which censors its search results in China, and Yahoo, which handed over emails to the Chinese government that led to the imprisonment of two journalists. But with no bans or sanctions on any specific conduct and most of its key guidelines left entirely up to interpretation, The Global Network Initiative seems more like an effort on the part of the participating companies to avoid legislation on their conduct abroad than anything else–a “We Promise to Be Good if You’ll Just Leave Us Alone” code, if you will. “After two years of effort, they have ended up with so little,” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA. “It is really very little more than a broad statement of support for a general principle without any concrete backup mechanism to ensure that the guidelines will be followed.”

In a 352-page report published last week, the National Research Council said data mining and behavior detection aren’t nearly as useful as their proponents claim. In fact, they’re of dubious scientific merit and have “enormous potential” for infringing on law-abiding Americans’ privacy. “Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other  known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” the Council found. “Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.”

While not an explicit condemnation of the techniques at issue here, the report does recommend that the government evaluate the effectiveness and lawfulness of these data mining and behavior-detection programs it’s so keen on before implementing them, and periodically thereafter. Said the Council, “History demonstrates that measures taken in the name of improving national security, especially in response to new threats or crises, have often proven to be both ineffective and offensive to the nation’s values and traditions of liberty and justice.”