14 DAY TRIAL // Google is launching an interesting new feature dubbed Account Activity. While it may seem like a security tool, and it is in some ways, it's more like an analytics tool for your Google activity, with info such as the number of searches you've made last month, how many views your YouTube videos have and so on.
"Each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services," Google's Andreas Tuerk wrote.
"For example, my most recent Account Activity report told me that I sent 5 percent more email than the previous month and received 3 percent more," he explained.
"An Italian hotel was my top Gmail contact for the month. I conducted 12 percent more Google searches than in the previous month, and my top queries reflected the vacation I was planning: [rome] and [hotel]," he added.
It's an interesting overview of your activity and you may find some surprising stuff in there. The sheer number of searches you do could be one. If you use Google Latitude, you'll also see a graph of how much time a week you spend at work versus at home or out.
It's also useful for spotting unusual activity on your account, for example being logged in from countries you haven't visited or from browsers you don't use. If that is the case, you should probably change your password and enable 2-step verification for good measure.
The tool is interesting and it joins more useful ones like the Google Dashboard, which lists most Google products you use and the data they store for you, or the ad preferences manager.
It's interesting to note that the new tool debuted a short while after Google's new unified privacy policy went live. Google could have created a similar tool before, the dashboard is the perfect example of that, but it's now trying to showcase some of the ways the new policy can be useful and also give you an idea of the type of data Google stores.