Google products are everywhere, from cloud services as Gmail and Google Drive, operating systems like Android OS or Chrome OS, Chrome browser with its 66% market share (Keizer, 2018), Google Assistant and smart devices connected to it, to hardware, for example Pixel phones or Chromebooks. Using its products, Google collected a great amount of data to get as precise profile of every individual as possible.
The most obvious way of the data collection is Google’s search engine, which keeps track of the topics users search for and which ads users click on. This is used to build a list of topics that are relevant to the individual. Google News provides extra topics user is interested in. To build a list of personal information, Google takes data from mobile phones, such as your name, email addresses, phone number, birthday, etc (DeMuro, 2018).
Another source of data is Gmail. Although in June 2018, Google promised to stop scanning content of users sent and received emails, some third-party apps still do this (Allan, 2018). Same goes for Hangouts’ messages and Calendar appointments, which all get analyzed. Google Photos, photo sharing and storage service, collects data on places tagged, items present in the picture, and even uses facial recognition to find out who is in the picture.
Google Maps, a popular web mapping and navigation service, not only tracks places users search for, but also every place visited, the amount of time spent there, or number of kilometers walked and driven each day. Google knows precisely where its users are at any given time. Even though, it is possible to “opt-out” from its location services, Google continues tracking all users. A lawsuit was filed due to this issue (Tung, 2018).
It is up to us to decide how much of our life we want to share with large corporations like Google and to find a balance between privacy on one hand and comfort and convenience on the other.
References
Allan, D., 2018. Google may not read your Gmail messages, but third-party apps do. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/google-may-not-read-your-gmail-messages-but-third-party-apps-do
[Accessed 2018 October 14].
DeMuro, J., 2018. What does Google know about you?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/what-does-google-know-about-you
[Accessed 2018 October 14].
Keizer, G., 2018. Top web browsers 2018: Internet Explorer sags below 10%. [Online]
Available at: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3199425/web-browsers/top-web-browsers-2018-internet-explorer-sags-below-10.html
[Accessed 14 October 2018].
Tung, L., 2018. Google sued for tracking you, even when ‘location history’ is off. [Online]
Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-sued-for-tracking-you-even-when-location-history-is-off/
[Accessed 14 October 2018].
