What Does Google Really Know About YOU?
While many believe Facebook is hoarding user’s data, it is not the only company doing so. Google, a name known to almost every internet user probably knows more about you than any other company. What is scary is that it might know you better than your best friends know you. Through its long list of widely-used products, it can gather your personal info, along with your browsing habits and much more. But what does Google really know about you?
Google Knows Who You Are
Google knows who you are, and we are not talking about the necessary information that we usually provide everywhere (name, birth date, gender, education, language of preference and much more), but they use the state of the art technology to ensure that they understand all your choices and understand what makes you the person you are. With simple yet effective measures, Google can create a comprehensive and dangerously appropriate profile of you, the user.
What You Look Like
With facial recognition at work in Google Photos, the search engine giant almost certainly has a fair idea of what you look like, and what you have looked like over the years. Actually, you have the option to create a ‘label’ within Google’s application that is, in essence, a tag for each person in the image, so Google can easily separate that specific person from every photo you ever upload, even if their face is partially captured or a little distorted due to noise. This means that Google not only knows what you look like, but it also knows what your friends look like.
What You Sound Like
Remember the time when you called out ‘Ok Google’ and asked the best French restaurant near your home? Well, Google keeps a log of your voice and knows what you sound like. In fact, you can just go to the ‘Voice and Audio’ section of Google’s My Activity page and see and hear all your voice logs. Your voice recordings and audio commands to Google Home or your Android Smartphone are all stored by Google, which can be used to identify your voice.
How Healthy Are You
While this may not seem much, but it still is a big factor of your life which Google knows all about. If you use Google Fit — a health tracking platform by Google, the company in all probability has a pretty good idea of your health, right from your daily activity and your goals. Even if you do not use the application, your searches can help Google frame an idea about your health, and the patters may even allow Google to put in the picture if you have a persistent illness or just a passing ailment.
Your Religious, Political and Other Beliefs
Have you donated something to a political party, or searched about your elected representative and went to their website, or watched a religious tape on YouTube? Then be assured that Google has built a comprehensive profile which covers your political, religious and all other beliefs which can tell which religion you believe in or are leaning towards and who might you vote for in the next election.
Google Knows Where You Have Been and Going Next
While many people believe that Google does searches best, but location tracking is one area where Google really tops the list. Thanks to the latest and highly advanced location recognition technology, Google has a whole list of places you have visited, right from the vacation you took three years ago to the restaurant that you ate out at last night.
Your Home and Office
Even if you don’t log into any application, your Android smartphone, which runs using Google’s services, tracks, records and saves your location, using Wi-Fi, GPS and your cellular network. This means your smartphone knows where you were and how long you stayed. Using such data strings, Google can draw a conclusion from it and decipher many things. For example, the location where your phone is through the night and majorly stays on the weekends will be your home, and Google can quickly determine where you live. If you do not have an Android smartphone and use a different OS, then Google Maps is following the same route and tracking you.
All The Places You Visit
Google not only knows the ins and outs of your daily life but also tracks the places you visit often and all the trips you have taken. Places like the coffee shop that you visit every week or the gym that you go to every day are all in Google’s data box. Moreover, the company also knows the places you have travelled to and knows where you went and how much time you spent there. So the last time you were in France and went to a museum, Google knows how much time you spent there and has all the pictures that you clicked there. The location tracking can also tell the method of transportation you used, like you took the bus or the train, or even walked to your destination.
Apart from Google maps and Android, Google also owns Waze, a GPS navigation software app. This means that even if you use this software rather than Google’s, they still will have your data.
Who Are Your Friends
Google has access to your contacts and your conversations through Gmail and Hangouts, along with your schedule through Google Calendar. Therefore, the firm knows everyone you talk to, what you talk about and when you will see them.
Who Are You Talking To
If you use an Android phone and use the standard messaging application, Google already has the list of people and the messages between them and you. Moreover, if you use Gmail for your personal or work dealings, Google has the list of those contacts as well and who you talk to most. You can even go to Google’s ‘frequently contacted’ section to see the list of people you converse with most.
Where Are You Meeting
Have you scheduled a group meeting with friends at that Sushi restaurant? Are you celebrating your sister’s birthday at that cafe? Are you meeting a friend for a drink? If it is on your Google Calendar, Google knows about it and can even track your movement using location tracking tools in your phone. If you take a picture at the restaurant and upload it to Google Photos, Google might use facial recognition to see who is in the photo and store it in its album. What’s scary is that Google will have these details years later as well.
What Do You Converse About
While this has been a hot topic of debate for many years and Google announced in mid-2017 that it would now cease the practice of reading emails from Gmail, which it did to create targeted advertisements for its users. While the announcement was well received, it is still not known if they have stopped reading emails or not.
What Do You Do Online
In its most basic form, Google is a search engine a company which provides internet services. To put things into perspective, Google nearly gets 40,000 search requests every second from around the globe. That amounts to 3.5 billion searches every day and approximately 1.2 trillion searches every year. That is 1,200,000,000,000 searches in one year (Source: internet live stats). So it is no revelation that apart from all your personal details, it knows everything that you do online.
It has a list of websites you have visited, videos you have watched on YouTube and every search you have ever made. This is a dangerous volume of data if you think about your activity over the years. Furthermore, it has an extensive understanding of your browsing habits through:
· Your applications on Google Play Store and Chrome Web Store
· Your browser settings
· The websites you have bookmarked
· The websites for which you saved your passwords, and the websites for which you did not
· Every tab you open while browsing
· Your auto-fill settings
· Number of Gmail and message conversations you have with a specific person
What does Google Do With Your Information?
While many believe Google is just a search engine, it is more than that. To most advertisers and marketers, Google is an advertising firm which helps them connect with a targeted audience. Google allows anyone to use its advertisement platforms and display ads to its millions of users around the globe. Anybody can purchase an advertisement space from Google and run search ads, shopping ads, video ads and much more. This is where your information is used. Using your data, Google places you in specific demographics to help advertisers play targeted ads.
You may be filtered by your age, gender, location, marriage status, college and other details. But these are necessary details which can be aggregated from nearly any social media website you have registered on. Google uses additional data it has on you and filters you on the basis of your browsing habits, interests and behaviours — so a pet store can show you an ad if you specified ‘animal lover’ anywhere or you will get an ad for a specific phone company if you are looking for a mobile online.
Why Should You Care
While you can say that what Google does is just showcasing ads on the basis of your interests, many believe it is an invasion of privacy and can be used to sway political and religious beliefs for the benefit of individuals or corporations. While there have been cases of many websites and applications using public data and selling it to corporations for their profit. The biggest scandal was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal, which was unearthed in early 2018. It was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm harvested the data of millions of profiles of Facebook users without their permission and then used it for political benefits. Once the scandal broke out, the firm went defunct in May 2018 (Source: Wikipedia).
How to Stop All This
If you believe that what Google does is immoral, you can follow the following steps to curb the data collection:
· Virtual Private Network (VPN): A Virtual Private Network or VPN will help you stop Google’s data collection to a large extent. Using a VPN will make your browsing more secure and hide your IP address and make your browsing history private among many other features. While there are many free VPN’s available, if you regularly browse online, purchasing a premium VPN will be a good bet to make.
· Turning off Location Reporting: If you do not want Google to keep track of your location, you can disable this feature in Google Maps and Android and Pixel phones by disabling the location reporting function. However, if you use Google Maps or Waze to find your way, they can still track you.
· Switching your browser: Google Chrome collects your data every time you hop online and continues till you close all tabs. To stop the data collection, you can switch to other browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer and much more. One important thing to note is that this step will only stop Google from tracking your data and if you switch browsers, your data will now go to the browser’s parent company.
· Deleting your Google Accounts: If you want to put a total end to Google’s data collection shenanigans, you will need to disown any and all Google products you use. That means you will have to delete any application owned by Google, such as Google Drive, YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail. You might also want to switch your Android device to another OS operated phone for maximum effect.
Instead of just a simple search engine, Google is a collection of companies that are now deeply embedded in our daily lives. Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Drive, Chrome, Hangouts, Google Books, Google Fit and much more. If you do not think much of online privacy, then you can continue your life as usual, but if you believe that your privacy is your top priority, we suggest you visit the Google Safety Centre and take necessary steps to stop Google from tracking you.
