How Much Your Search History Reveals About You — And What This Data is Used for
Tackling new age stalking in 2018’s data economy
By Pon Swee Man
Data, Your Digital Diary
There are some things you don’t tell anyone: your spur-of-the-moment thoughts, deepest fears and secret guilty pleasures. Instead, you pour them out on browsers like Google and Instagram, accumulating a digital footprint that reveals more about you than your best friend would know.
Unbeknownst to you, someone out there knows all these information and wields the power to sell it to others or help others mine it for themselves at their own discretion. With Google Ads, Analytics and a plethora of data mining sites becoming the backbone of today’s data-powered economy, your personal data is no longer private to those willing to pay for it.
How Much Google Knows About You from Your Search History Alone
1. Your Entire “About Me” Profile — Interests, Likes and Needs
It’s like a Personal Particulars sheet that’s been filled in for you. If you’ve signed in to your Google account, Google has you narrowed down to your age demographic, gender, likes, interests and needs — all derived from your search history and web activity.
That’s not all — it compares this data over time and surfaces trends that hint at your personality type and financial ability, valuable intel that helps Google to predict your future needs and wants.
2. Your Daily Routine
Just like how we’ve heard the horror stories of Uber employees stalking their riders via in-app location services, your daily digital activity comprises data you’d never readily tell a stranger.
From your Google Map searches to the places you frequent religiously, your approximate daily routine is as clear as day, making it easy for Google to know the prime time to send a nearby dinner deal your way just in time to coincide with your commute home.
3. Instagram and Facebook Know Your Friends — Even Those You’ve Yet to Meet
Instagram-holics would know that you can find your phonebook contacts on Facebook, and thereafter, Instagram. It is definitely not luck when your new Facebook friend pops up on your Instagram Explore page, or when you receive a notification telling you that Rachel on Facebook is on Instagram over at paintedkitties.
How does a social media algorithm know more about your friends than you do? Before Instagram, Facebook and Location services teamed up to unleash contact-syncing across social media channels, you’d never find Rachel — much less find her unless she tells you her username.
Obviously, Facebook and Instagram have gotten a clear grasp of our friendship circles — right down to who they think we would make good friends with.
4. Google Knows What You Like — And How Likely You’ll Buy it (Right Down to a %)
Humans are fickle and unpredictable. When it comes to shopping, Libra horoscopes are especially indecisive — but even Google has a fix for this. One of its features include being able to put a probable percentage on how likely you’ll buy something based on your search history. So if you’ve been bookmarking tops on ASOS and going back to the same few pages, Google likely knows how likely you’ll buy it — even before you know it for sure.
What This Data Is Used For
- Re-marketing, aka Ad-Stalking
Déjà vu, followed by relentless ad re-appearances of the same tee you said no to a few websites ago — that’s re-marketing in a nutshell. With digital marketing across platforms, the same tee can haunt you via banner ads plastered across YouTube, Facebook and the like — until you cave in.
2. Personalised Recommendations
Everything is categorised via SEO; by visiting a particular site, you’re telling Google that your interests fall into that category, which OKs them sending related ads your way for “your benefit”.
Ever wonder why you keep seeing ads for gyms in your neighbourhood after you’ve searched up weight loss videos on YouTube? Now you know.
How to Tackle Sites That Are Always Taking Your Data
1. Delete Your Digital Footprint Daily
Sure, you can open a New Incognito Window each time you make a search. You can clear your cache and browsing data at the end of each day, and you can even wipe yourself off the web. But as long as you’re surfing Google or scrolling through Facebook, Instagram and websites that use data collection services, you can never fully escape your digital footprint.
A helpful way to cope is to do a daily wipedown of your daily digital footprint
2. Reconfigure Your Privacy Settings
Narrow down what makes you tick, and check those opt-out boxes. Google has always fairly offered its consumers a choice via its ad settings, and the recently passed GDPR has forced many websites to include opt-out pop-ups for on-site cookies. Google Analytics has helpfully included an opt-out extension that keeps users off its data radar.
3. Profit off Your Data
If you can’t beat them, join them; you might just profit off it.
Once we come to accept data collection as the basis of better product ideas and personalised ways to help us find our way through today’s information-saturated world, we can take more informed steps to make our data work for us.
With token incentives, you’d be more willing to provide honest and constructive consumer data.
Symphony is one such novel proposition based on up-and-coming blockchain technology. The blockchain forges mutually beneficial relationships between data providers and collectors, incentivising data provision and thereby connecting those who need it to those willing to give it.
Scope out how to profit off your data with Symphony here.
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