Google Actually Has More Data on Us than My Paranoia Had Suggested

Over in The Guardian, Dylan Curran goes through many of the different kinds of data Google has on its users and how that data is collected. Some interesting bits:

Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. You can see a timeline of where you’ve been from the very first day you started using Google on your phone. ...
Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices. ...
Google stores all of your YouTube history ... 
Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. 
This link includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google … 
They also have data from your calendar, your Google hangout sessions, your location history, the music you listen to, the Google books you’ve purchased, the Google groups you’re in, the websites you’ve created, the phones you’ve owned, the pages you’ve shared, how many steps you walk in a day …

He gives links to see Google's files on you for each of these kinds of data, and others. Creepily, Google apparently keeps information you have deleted.

And then ...

Manage to gain access to someone’s Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last 10 years.
I thought I might have avoided some of this by not being logged in to Google most of the time, which is a good step. Then I noticed that when I visit this blog, I always have the option to post, and thus must be signed in. Oh well. Guess I'll change that now.

4 comments:

E Hines said...

Onliest Alphabet [sic--Google is just one part of their broadened privacy invasion capacity] thing I use is YouTube, to play classical music and rock 'n' roll and to play, occasionally, the YouTube link posted here. I object on principle to Alphabet tracking my music, but if they can make anything of my musical interests, I'd be interested in hearing their logic.

I also have an Android cell phone, so Alphabet has a potful of stuff on that. But I have all location stuff turned off, including GPS accesses. I don't use my telephone to access the Internet.

I don't use Alphabet to search. I switched to Bing and DuckDuckGo when Alphabet exposed their bigotry with the Damore Affair. Microsoft has its own privacy invasion problems, and DDG just isn't that good, but at least neither are Alphabet.

T-bird is my calendar; there's nothing else on my machines--not even LookOut (not to be confused with Lookout, an Android cell phone antimalware ap that's pretty good). I don't have my cell phone's calendar ap turned on.

I don't use Hangout--besides it being an Alphabet facility, I'm not that social.

I don't do anything in the cloud. Alphabet's presence there is simply irrelevant to me.

Interesting to see so much of Alphabet's invasion facilities gathered into one place.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

I DuckDuckWent back in January. It has a better search system than Ixquick, and now it has a much, much better image-search procedure for what I need, since G--gle eliminated the "view image" function.

LittleRed1

jaed said...

Bad news if you think you just use Youtube for music:

You know all those sites and pages with an embedded Youtube video? Google can track your reading of those sites too. The embedded video acts as a web bug even if you don't play it. And since so many sites have embedded video, and Youtube is the most popular video provider....

E Hines said...

All the other video providers do much the same.

Sounds like a market niche to me, for someone with the programming skills and someone else with the marketing skills.

Eric Hines