Google Knows you more than You know about Yourself! | Techronicle

Do you guys know that there is a portal you can visit, which shows you all the info that Google has both gathered and predicted about you and it's kind of scary

So when you visit the page,

You will see at the top there are a couple of things like your age, your gender and that's fair enough.

The stuff that you have entered yourself.

But then you've got this gigantic list of interests and the scary / intriguing thing is just how specific it is. So if you were mentioning to someone on a Google Hangouts chat the other day about a potential holiday to Ladakh and boom on the Google servers it will be flagged as one of your interests.

They even clock on your Netflix activity, that would explain how it knows the type of TV that you watch.

It even picks up on your obsession with customization and so it knows to target you with services related to personalization.

By the terms you search, Google also predicts what will soon be an interest for you.

So this triggered a bit of a thought process for me, most people reading this are probably using at least 20 services owned by Google but the scary things start to happen when you merge the knowledge that it gains from these various platforms

For example YouTube comments, Google publicly states that they keep track of every single YouTube comment you've ever left which is fine right? because most people use YouTube under some sort of anonymous identity so nobody knows who you are right….?

Wrong! Google does know it all even if you post anything anonymously!

Google knows exactly who you are,

they know which Smartphone you've commented from,

they know your real name because of all the other stuff you do on this phone and

they know where you live this might all seem pretty obvious but I've seen a lot of people writing comments as if they were 100% anonymous and invincible when really Google has a permanent record of it so just be careful what you write online.

Here's another thing if you think about when people are most unashamedly themselves it's when they're on their own which is also usually when you're going to be looking things up watching videos that you like or in other words sending information to Google it's perfectly possible then that in some ways Google knows you better than your family and your friends you're not going to tell your family that you're secretly into Mine craft videos at the age of 23 and you're not going to ask your friends to check a Lump you've just found on your body.

 

Also Read: How Amazon Secretly Controls almost half of The Internet! 

 

Google is who you share the information with and to clarify we know that Google collects this information we consent to.

But it's kind of crazy how powerful that becomes when it all accumulates!

Google could recognize you better than your own mother!

Think about this, you take a selfie on your phone, Google photos knows from the image data that this is a selfie and therefore a photo of you,

The algorithm then trains itself to become better and better at recognizing you every time you take a photo to the point where now for me Google knows I'm in a photo even if I'm a tiny obscured face in the background and it knows exactly how I sound.

If you think about how you set up Google assistant. The first thing you do is train it to recognize your voice and just like the Photos app, it learns more about the nuances of my speech each time I interact with it in fact Google stores an online recording of every interaction you’ve ever had with your assistant which is super creepy

So when I found about this archive I was listening to clips of myself in 2017 asking it what the weather was.

But maybe the most invasive part of this is the location timeline,

Google keeps track of every town city and country you've been to, how long you spent there and exactly which places you end up visiting

I saw that It knows that the last time I was in New Delhi I took an 11 minute walk from the McDonalds to my hotel.

Every 30 seconds or so for the rest of your life your Smartphone or whatever the future equivalent looks like will be beaming your exact location to Google.

So all of this has I'd say quite three severe implications 

Number One

is that it is vital that you protect your Google account there's a bit of a misconception that if someone manages to hack you then the worst they can do is fire off a few dodgy emails. No!! this person has access to essentially your entire preferences and personality, your friends, your family, your location they can effectively download you.

Number Two

Whilst Google does have an immense amount of power here there are hundreds of governing bodies that prevent them exploiting it and so for almost all of us it still makes sense to trust the company given how much easier it makes our lives.

And Number Three

With this much information Google faces a bit of a moral dilemma whilst your data is not being shared as part of the company's core ethos.

There are a lot of cases where it might actually benefit society for that data to be shared

Google could pick up on where a criminal is hiding

it could predict which people are at risk of self-harm and

it could start flagging potential terrorists just based on their search history.

Also Read: How fake news influence common people and how to stop it

Conclusion

All right guys thank you so much for Reading this post, I really hope you learned something from this and if you did don't forget to comment your views on this one and yes do connect with us on the social media where we share Such interesting posts and we can also have some chit chat about how technology is shaping our world.

 

Update 30/04/2022

Users can now request that private information such as phone numbers, emails, and physical addresses be removed from search results. Google's action is part of a larger effort to combat online identity theft and harmful activity.
"Google may delete personally identifiable information that poses a serious risk of identity theft, financial fraud, harmful direct contact, or other specified problems," the company wrote in an online disclaimer.

Users could already request that highly personal content that could cause direct harm be removed from Google Search. This includes information that could be used to commit fraud, such as bank account or credit card details.
Information on or from the government and other official sources, newsworthy content, and professionally relevant content are all examples of public interest content.
Furthermore, Google cautioned that deleting content from Google Search will not erase it off the internet. As a result, Google recommends that customers contact hosting companies directly.