I downloaded everything Google knows about me

Yup, that seems pretty accurate

There are obvious ones like your online queries. A personal example:
5 nov. 2011 18:08:43 — “how to make stop motion using windows movie maker”.

But it doesn’t stop there.

How about every YouTube video you have ever watched, your possible weight, and a confidence level of “8” that I was on a bike yesterday at 3:02 PM?

The first shocker is the meticulous way my location history has been recorded and interpreted. Sure, I get an ominous feeling when indifferently agreeing to Google’s terms and conditions whenever they pop up, but seeing their actual findings is freaky.

When moving from A to B, your speed and location seem to be analyzed to find out what you are possibly up to. My files listed more than 25 different modes of transportation, among whom were skateboarding, sailing, sledding, in gondola lift, and even catching pokémon.

I haven’t done any of those things as of late, but it certainly makes my life seem busy and adventurous.

Every place you look up in Google Maps is logged too, which reminded me of a job I had in 2018 and totally forgot about. For two months on weekdays, I took the bus to a village next to my hometown where I worked as a gardener. To find out at what time the bus would depart, I’d use Maps.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out that Google knows where you live and work — those places where you go an awful lot.

Some other things that went straight on my “gee, that’s a little fucked up-list”:

Every move you make online, whether you do so with any thought behind it or not, is being noted.

You can try this out yourself. Open your browser history and just go back a couple of days: you’ll probably see a ton of websites you already forgot you visited. By remembering all of it, Google knows your online behavior more intimately than you know it yourself.

What you look for, what you watch on YouTube, the places you frequent. Together they’d give someone (or something, like a supercomputer) a pretty accurate idea of what you do on a daily basis, but also what you’re into, and might be into.

Even more accurately when dedicated algorithms are used to find similarities between you and other individuals like you. People who like coffee places and work on a laptop might be interested in a co-working space, or Apple products.

This knowledge can be used to entice you with well-targeted ads or content that suits your political leaning. But further down the rabbit hole, there is the potential to use all this data more proactively, rather than just in response to your interests.

Besides the voyeurism into our personal lives, a looming danger lies in knowledge of the crowds and how to influence them. Provided that we are all contributing to this giant heap of information, there is no guarantee that it will not be used against us.

If you‘d like some basic tips on how to protect your privacy while browsing, check out this article I wrote for The Startup.

Related posts:

There definitely are bad stock prices. Obviously, each company has a correct value and as long as there is a value that is correctly priced, there can’t be a bad stock. However, if history is any…

Fierce debate has been sparked by the extraordinary images from Bristol today of the bronze statue of Edward Colston being dragged off its plinth by protesters and thrown into the harbour. Seldom…

There are a lot of sources out there for understanding how to shape your reality and get the most out of life. The internet is full of amazing articles and stories for just that! However, there is…