Google - the world's largest advertising company. It produces the most popular browser in the world, owns the most popular mobile platform and supports the work of the largest search engine on the Internet. The video service, postal and cartographic services Google more than 1 billion users (each of them). The company uses the ubiquity of its products to track user behavior online and the IRL, to subsequently target them with paid advertising. The accuracy of targeting and the vastness of the data collected directly depend on the income of Google.
Unfortunately, in today's environment it is almost impossible to avoid Google's surveillance. To such conclusions experts from the organization Digital Content Next and Vanderbilt University came. The results of their research Google Data Collection (pdf) are published in the public domain.
Here are some key facts that the researchers found out:
Android smartphone in the "sleep" mode (with the active Chrome browser in the background) transmits location information to Google 340 times during the 24-hour period, that is, an average of 14 data transfers per hour. In fact, location information is 35% of all sample data sent to Google.
For comparison, a similar experiment on the iOS device with Safari showed that in the absence of Chrome, Google can not collect any noticeable data if the user does not interact with the device. In addition, inactive Android-smartphone with Chrome browser installed sends to Google almost 50 times more data requests per hour than the inactive iOS phone with Safari.
Inactive Android device interacts with Google almost 10 times more often than the Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results underscore that Android and Chrome platforms are critically important for Google's data collection. Again, these experiments were conducted on fixed telephones without interaction with the user. If you really use the phone, then the amount of information transmitted increases significantly.
Google has the ability to link anonymous data collected by passive means to the user's personal information. Google establishes such a link mainly through advertising systems, many of which itself controls. Advertising IDs that are supposed to correspond to "anonymous users" collect activity data in applications and visits to third-party web pages. They can be linked to the real identification of Google users by transferring to Google servers identification information at the level of the Android device.
The Doubleclick cookie identifier that tracks user activity on third-party web pages is another example of an "anonymous" identifier that Google can associate with a Google account. The connection is established if the user accesses the Google application in the same browser that previously opened the third-party web page.
Most of Google's data collection occurs at a time when the user does not interact directly with any of Google's products. The scale of the collection is very significant, especially on mobile devices Android. It should be taken into account that the Android smartphone is perhaps the most popular personal accessory, which around the clock carries with it 2 billion people.
The authors of the report draw attention to the fact that recently the attention of the public and the criticism of human rights organizations are in many respects directed against Facebook. But the 55-page Google Data Collection report shows that the scale of surveillance by Google is much higher than that of a social network that has fewer users. The authors believe that Google collects a lot more personal information than Facebook.
"The report was prepared by a professional group of lobbyists and was written by order of Oracle in the current legal proceedings with Google on intellectual property. Not surprisingly, the document contains highly misleading information, "the Google spokesman said in a CNN comment.