This time, we’re talking Google, not Facebook. These links come from this Twitter thread posted by Dylan Curran. Good stuff.
Jump into your browser and click:
– This link shows you the location data Google keeps on you. At some point, I purposely set Location History to off, so my Google Timeline is empty.
– This link shows your Google and YouTube search and other activity. There’s a ton of info here.
– This link shows the third party apps that have access to your Google account. Definitely check this one for all your Google accounts.
– Your YouTube history. This says a lot about you. Very valuable to advertisers.
There’s a lot more. Step through the thread. Or download your Google data using this link.
Along with Facebook, I’ve tried to keep off of Google as best I can, within reason. Although I have a Google account, I am logged out of it close to 100% of the time. I use DuckDuckGo instead for search. I don’t use Google services. I stopped using Waze once Google bought it. Following the links above, I have “No History” on all of them. That makes me feel good, like the effort I’ve put in hasn’t gone to waste.
Of course, the information at those links is what Google has associated to your ACCOUNT, and which Google chooses to surface. They probably have a lot of information about your BROWSER, even if they don’t know it’s you, or they have a lot about you as an individual outside of your account-logged activity.
Thanks for those links Dave, very useful to have all of that in one place.
Be aware, too, that many of these UIs are designed to show less of what Google’s tracking than you think they’re showing. Your YouTube history, for instance, has radio buttons on the right that controls what you’re looking at.
Agreed. I have a gmail account and apparently I went in years ago and limited Google’s tracking through my account options as much as humanly possible because when I follow Google’s links like you have I show no recorded activity. I did the same with my Facebook account years ago. There’s nothing in my Facebook archive but stuff I’ve posted for all of my Facebook friends to see.
I have a family member who works for Google and a friend who works for Facebook. These companies have two pools of data. They have a pool of data they associate with your public identity and they also have a pool of data they consider to be “anonymous” in that they claim that they store it in such a fashion that it could never be associated with your public identity.
When you check what they have on you using the links they provide you see the data they claim is linked to your public identity. You do not see the data they have collected on you that they claim has been stored in such a way as to make you anonymous.
So basically you have no clue what data they really have on you and, as such, you have to hope that when they claim the other data they have on you has been stored in a fashion that makes you anonymous that they are not lying and that neither a rouge employee or a hacker could get their hands on this data and tie it back to you.
Facebook has lost all credibility in this department. Google hasn’t lost nearly as much but since selling or profiting from your private data is their primary business I don’t trust them either. I do trust Apple. They make no bones about it. They make their money by selling you hardware, not by selling your private data.
Thanks Steven. I missed that. Double-cleared!
Thank you for the article/links.
It appears that Google does have that much on me.