What Does Google Know About Me?

It took me under 30 seconds to determine that Google knew way too much about me. Proof?

The first place to visit is: http://www.google.com/settings/ads/

This will bring you to a place where you can personalize what ads you do and do not see from Google, based on their analytics data they’ve retrieved from every link you’ve clicked and site you’ve visited.

You can click on one of the tags to determine how that topic was chosen.

So, I found that Google knew I had kids, just because of some of the links I’ve visited. Note, I haven’t looked into any parenting resources or anything of that sort.

Your analytics data is used to feed ads leading to everyone of these topics. It becomes readily available for others to target you.

How about your location? Check out: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb

What about your search history? Look here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

And all of this data gets thrust into the ad space that is used to target you. Or, it gets sold off to the highest bigger, like Mastercard.

This is part of the reason we’re creating Engauge Analytics, an analytics engine without the evil.

The good news is that you can adjust your ad settings with the links above, and even get monthly security reports from Google. Well worth checking out!