What Google knows about you?

The digital era comes with privacy invasion and open data black markets, everyone should be aware of how and when their private data is been gathered and used by the companies. Today we’ll talk about our own friendly neighborhood company Google. Vaguely speaking Google has enough data about you that it can create a perfect replica of you not just on physical level but also on the psychological level.

Here I’m listing some of them and will let you know how you can stop Google from taking your data.

1. Web and App Activity

Every search query that go through any Google synced device is stored into Google servers for the infinite time. Google also knows when and for how much time you’ve opened which app on your smartphone and have a complete track of your daily usage.

From Facebook to YouTube, whichever website you ever visit and how you are redirected to the site, the complete web map is available to Google.

2. Location History

Remember the notification of rating a place as soon as you leave the place? Or when you just reach a place and you get to know about all the buses and means of transports available for you to head back home.

From malls to cafe, wherever you go with your location enabled smartphone, Google know it and saves it. You can look at all the places you have visited date-wise on a timeline maintained by Google.

3. YouTube History

Watch one video on YouTube and next thing you know that your whole feed is populated with similar items. Yes! Google knows your watch history unless you are using incognito mode.

YouTube’s algorithm works in a fashion that all the content similar to your watched history is displayed for you, to keep you hooked. It also creates various playlists for you based on your music preferences.

4. Ads and Interests

You must have noticed how the item you searched on Facebook is now literally all over your device. YouTube! same ads, Browser! same ads, Instagram! same ads. But, I guess it is somewhat a good thing because when you disable the ad preferences, you see many things you never want to watch.

5. Your voice and interactions

Literally every word you say to your Google Assistant and Smart Speaker is stored on the Google Database and research goes on constantly to train the Google Voice Model for better User Experience and Interactions. You can also play the audio recordings back to yourself from the database.

With all this, now you might be curious about your data with Google and you may wish to personally take command over what you want to show to Google, because Google! not Facebook.

To see and download your data with Google, you need to sign in with google and then go to Manage your Google Account. For the basic personal details like name and birthdays, you need to go to Personal info, and for more detailed data, the one I just mentioned above, you need to go to Data and Personalization. Then just dig a bit deep and you’ll be able to access all your data and control what you want to show, keep and hide in the future.