Everyone knows fact that Google knows everything about us. Google collects information about us based on our activity in their services – Google search, maps, Youtube, chrome web browser (but also other browser which used Google Search Engine itself).
When we use those services, all information about how and what we do on it are logged on Google servers, and can be analyze by Google. And they are. Google need all that information to earn money. The mainly source of income for internet services (especially those free) are selling advertisement. Advertisers in turn, expect the best, or the most relevant pathway to the clients. This is a reason why Google (and of course others companies), tries to use all data from users to get information about them. Then use it to sell advertisement space targeted directly to users. Nowadays, there is no free content in internet. Everyone try to get money from users – and the most common practice are show an advertisement.
People don’t understand
what is the reason for collect all data. They don’t know that is common action, also in others companies – not only in Google. But mostly big companies are accused of spying. Possible because users seen how that companies use that data. Targeted advertisement (even based on email text), recommendation of new videos to see, information about events close to you, or fastest way to home – even if you never give your home address. It looks like invigilation. And probably if we had thought about someone – one person – who will collect that kind data – it could be danger situation. But we talk about big company, which has a lot of users and a lot of data to “understand”. For them we are some kind number. Only element in collections, which are collections of others collections. Generally the set of information about us is only a part of huge tree data of all users. Those data are use for advertisement and to earn money, but also to create new functionalities for users. So simply – this is a business
But often we forget about it
And we still think that everything what we do in internet is ours, and no one can use it. We forget about rules – every service in internet has their own policy and we agree with it when we register our account, and we start use it. All information about how our data will be used are in those policies. So we agree with it. So we shouldn’t be shocked when Google use your photo to display some targeted advertisement to you. We shouldn’t be surprised when Google say “hello” when we get our home. Or more – there was situation, when Google found automatically a children pornography on one of gmail account, and they noticed police about it. And they can do it (scan and inform about users) because it was in line with their policy.
Not only Google
And like I said, not only Google collect that kind of information. Basically mostly companies nowadays try to collect information about users. But Google give us chance to manage those data. For a long time Google give their users options to clear history – which was used to serve advertisement, choose what kind of advertisement we would like to get, and change it. Now they give us also more options to manage information about us, because we can decide what single element from our activity we want to remove. So we can clear our search history, voice records, or history of watching youtube videos. And is great think. Great news. But … in my opinion it’s nothing excited.
Why? Because Google still have all information about us, and they can categorize us. Now they give us only more features to manage, and configure settings of services and advertisement. They give us also some fake sense of security – because we can thing that we and only we decide about our account. But still Google has a lot of information about our activity. Everything is in logs, logs are archive and even if Google stop analyze those data, they are still available. There are everywhere on servers, data centers, in our operators. If someone want to they can get our activity. I think we shouldn’t panic about it. We should think what we do in internet, try to understand how internet business working, and understand why and what for our activity is analyzed and have fun with using internet.