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Reddit user AlleKeskitason asked other community members that had downloaded their Google data, what the most unsettling things they found were. Incredibly, people replied. And their responses were both hilarious and deeply disturbing. For example, one Redditer found out that they’re the “vice-president” of a company they’ve never heard of. While another person found some recordings of their computer’s fan spinning. Spooky, right?
Bored Panda interviewed AlleKeskitason about Google and online privacy: “First of all we have to understand that when you use services like Gmail, it's far away from being private. The price of free [services] is being the product and Gmail scans through your emails, which is why Google is able to show your online purchases and notifying you of your flights, reservations and things like that. Likewise, by default, your Android phone tracks your location. I found a pretty detailed path of myself walking in rather unsavory places many years ago. While you think you have nothing to hide, the information can be used to determine a detailed profile of you. What you like, what time you go to work and back, where you live and much more. Furthermore, "nothing to hide" is just a lie people tell themselves, everybody has something they don't want to reveal. All this is used to make a profile of you and used for marketing, which is why Google is so effective in it and why your phone was as cheap as it was.”
#4
“If you want to do something, but don't want to make your life unnecessarily difficult, you might want to turn off location and most of the other data collection. Google doesn't have to have a record of what you browsed, what you searched and where you were five years ago. Apps on your phone should be granted only the permissions they need, some silly app doesn't need your location or access to contacts and microphone,” AlleKeskitason explained to Bored Panda. “Now the obvious question is: if you turned everything off, are you sure they don't gather data on you? For example, even with location turned off, your rough location can be estimated based on what wifis and cell towers your phone tries to connect to and their signal strength.”
#5
“Avoiding tracking completely can be absolutely daunting task, but there are several things you can do to minimize it, if you are ready to suffer some inconvenience:
- Consider alternative services for the stuff that Google offers, like a paid email that costs a few bucks per month, some other map service and so on. Google search is great, but there are privacy friendly alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Startpage.com.
- Have one browser for social media and Google stuff, and a completely different one, absolutely not Chrome or Chromium, for everything else. In that other browser you want to install at minimum something like Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (the latter one has a learning curve) to be able to refuse any connections to third-party sites that track you. The reason for this is that many, if not most, pages have a button to sign in using Google account or Facebook like button or something similar. When you go to one site, you also have a connection to their sites to load these. Thanks to cookies and browser fingerprinting, even if you are not logged in to anything, your activities can be traced right back to you.
- You can go to your account page to remove location and all other history, if you don't want to delete your whole account. Also, if you reside in the EU, you can make a GDPR request to remove all your data. Is it really permanently gone? Well, we just have to take their word on that. Google (or rather Alphabet) might play nice and remove it, but it's good to keep in mind that sometimes it's more beneficial for companies to later just say "sorry" and pay fines than to comply. More than one company has been caught doing just that."
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AlleKeskitason also added in their interview with Bored Panda: “I don't consider myself to be a tin foil hat or asking anyone else to be either, but given the sheer magnitude of data collection, I would be a bit worried for several reasons. Google might store the information safely, but you still have all the eggs in the same basket so the safety is at best as good as your password and a 2-factor authentication.”
#7
“Furthermore, I'd like the readers to consider the following:
- Tech giants have far more data points about us than most people believe. It's more than location, searches and purchases. It's also on what machine, on what network, who else is there, what completely unrelated sites you visit, what forums you read, what you watch, your pictures and the metadata in them and so on.
- Speaking of metadata, do you think that nude you sent to someone is safe because it doesn't show face or other identifying details? Well, I hope you scraped the metadata away, because there is a good change that it has the GPS coordinates on where it was taken.
- Companies might or might not play nicely and delete data on request. Google (or Alphabet) might store it safely, but some other might have already packaged it and sold to a third party. Or it has been simply given as a part of a deal, as happened with Cambridge Analytica. The problem is, we don't know what happens behind the scenes.
- Data leaks are a real thing. It might be due to incompetence, carelessness or simply a disgruntled worker. This has already happened many times in just this decade and the information is a commodity that is worth money in the dark web.
- Be very mindful of what you give out. When you install for example WhatsApp and give it a permission read the contacts, you also give the numbers of all the people who don't want to be a part of Facebook to Facebook. Same thing happens when you upload a photo that has your friend in it and maybe even tag her name in it. Congratulations, your friend has now her own shadow profile on Facebook and that's just a starting point of it, without her having any say on whether she wants to be part of it or not. Just in case you might think I'm paranoid and make this up, shadow profiles are a real thing and Facebook has admitted it. They said it was for "security reasons", but did not elaborate just whose security they had in mind. Considering that Facebook is just an information midget compared to Alphabet, would it be unreasonable to think that they have them as well?
- Just understand that we live in a computer age. Computing power keeps growing, storage capability keeps growing, data collection keeps growing. Facial recognition is a thing, as is voice recognition and deepfakes. AI and machine learning are things that exist and are being developed. There are far more data being collected than we realize, stored indefinitely and insecurely, dots connected in more ways than we can imagine and all that managed by far more incompetent and irresponsible people that we would like to think.
I also want to mention one more problem with data storing: things change. A joke you say today can [hurt you] 10 years from now. Future government might decide that they don't like you. This might sound ludicrous, but when you consider how for example Chinese government works, what part Google plays in making smart devices, that Google really wants to do business there and how facial recognition is a thing, we realize what kind of scenarios are really possible. Companies like Alphabet are one-stop-shops for governments and information is valuable in more than one way.”
#8
Suggested that you friend her as well.
Google/Facebook recognise people that regularly share the same wifi connection and assume they are related or friends. If one person searches ‘Caribbean Holiday’, others on the network will start getting ads for Caribbean holidays.
It goes even further. Phone radios like Wifi and Bluetooth have unique identifying features ‘UID’s. Two phones within range of eachother will recognise eachother, associate the UIDs with each phone’s accounts. This means that if you regularly spend time with people (like work colleagues), Google/Facebook will know. And so you often get these people as friend suggestions, you start getting ad suggestions for things they search for.
Dylan Curran writes in The Guardian that “the harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine.” Apparently, Google stores your location every single time you turn on your phone, but that’s just for starters. What’s more, Google also stores search history across all of your devices, so deleting it on one device doesn’t mean that there isn’t data saved from other devices.
#9
Oh yeah, Google also has an ad profile created based on all the information it’s collected on you. And it stores all of your YouTube history, meaning, it can guess quite a lot about your life and your goals. If you ever plan on downloading your Google data, keep in mind it’s quite a big file because it includes everything. And I mean everything: from your calendar data and the photos you’ve taken to your bookmarks and emails. Now, I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to sign into my Google account and alter my privacy settings.
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What do you think of Google collecting your data? Do you think you could ever go through it all? Maybe you’ve actually done it before? A penny for your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.