Thanks to the recent fiasco with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a lot of regular people are now sitting up and paying more attention to their data floating around the Internet. The problem is, it¡¯s a little too late to begin crying foul now.
We¡¯ve gotten so accustomed to enjoying free services on the Internet, that we¡¯ve never stopped to think just how these companies make their money.
Because when the product is free, and the only money made is from advertising, it¡¯s not actually the product. You are. Everytime you sign up for an app, or register your email address, or interact with a social media post, a piece of you is left behind as a marker to your identity. This becomes the basis on which a company can market to you more effectively.
In fact, you¡¯d be surprised by just how much data Google and Facebook have about you. Luckily, there are some pretty easy ways you can check.
For Facebook, you can find a number of details about you in your Settings menu on your profile. Clicking on the 'Apps' will show you all the apps that can harvest data from your Facebook account. It¡¯s not just Facebook quizzes and apps either. Anytime you download an app on your smartphone and click ¡°login using Facebook¡± it shows up here. The problem is, all you can do from this list is remove certain data viewing permissions from apps, or unlink them from your account entirely.
However, if you want those apps to delete your data they already have, you're going to have to contact them individually. Even more worrisome however is the section a little lower reading 'Apps Others Use'. This is actually a bunch of settings limiting what data developers of apps your friends use can see about you. And if you haven't unchecked these boxes yet, they already have information about you.
Facebook takes all the apps you interact with, all the pages for corporations, celebrities, and news website, all the things you search for, and uses it to form a profile for you. This profile helps advertisers better market their products to the people most likely to be interested in them. Wondering what Facebook thinks of you as a person? Just check out the 'Ads'?section of your settings and click through.
One thing you can do with both Google and Facebook is download the entire repository of your data the companies have. For Facebook, the option sits at the bottom of your?¡®Settings¡¯?menu, which includes photos and videos you¡¯ve shared, messages and chats you¡¯ve sent, even GIFs you've interacted with. And you might have expected they were saving your ad data, but did you ever expect each chat message to have been saved on their data servers as well?
For one thing, just take a stroll past myaccount.google.com. And no you don¡¯t need to even bookmark that. Just sign into Google (Gmail and Chrome both work), click on your profile picture in the top right, and hit the blue ¡®My Account¡¯ button. On this landing page you¡¯ll find a huge section for ¡®Personal info and Privacy¡¯, right smack dab in the middle. That innocuous section my friend is the repository of everything Google knows about you.
What might already be obvious is that, aside from your name and email address Google also knows your birthday and phone number. However, Google also knows wherever you go in your day, thanks to Google Maps. On something called your Google Maps Timeline, it uses a combination of GPS on your Android and other data points to pinpoint where you travel, how often, and by what kind of transportation. Sure, this may seem incredibly creepy to you, but there¡¯s a purpose to it. It¡¯s easy to access right from the Google Maps menu because the feature could be a godsend if you leave your smartphone in a cab
Most importantly however, is the ¡®My Activity¡¯ page, accessible from the same panel we showed you up top. Now this is a comprehensive list of pretty much everything you do across all Google-powered platforms. It¡¯s got not just your Search and web history, but also your updated contacts, and what apps you accessed during the day (if you¡¯re an Android user).
Like Facebook, Google also extensively collects data about you for advertising, making a profile of sorts in the process. This is based on your browsing and viewing habits while logged in, and you can have a look at the entire list of tags attached to your name here.
Unfortunately for you, Google also keeps tabs on the videos you watch on YouTube all day. Not just that, it also records the searchers you perform on the site, even if you never watch a video from the results. It¡¯s not a giant secret though, just visit the ¡®History¡¯ link through your YouTube menu and it¡¯s all right there. You can even delete stuff so that YouTube doesn¡¯t show you content related to it in the future. Probably best no one ever sees the multiple My Little Pony links eh?
To download your Google data, just visit takeout.google.com to download whatever you feel like. This includes search and YouTube data, Maps History, stuff from your Drive, Gmail and Calendar, the works. Once that's done however, you're still going to have to delete your data if you want to truly be off the grid.
The problem here is that, you can deactivate your Facebook account, which automatically deletes your names and photo from anything you¡¯ve shared on the platform. However, pretty much everything else sticks around, and there¡¯s no way to delete any of it. Even doing something so simple as unsyncing your contacts (updated through Messenger or the main app) requires multiple clicks. And that¡¯s only if you already knew how to do it in the first place because it¡¯s not intuitive at all.
Google is somewhat better in this fashion, offering you multiple options to customize how much data you share, all in one place. Remember that photo of the Account panel from the top? Just hit the ¡®Privacy checkup¡¯ button and it¡¯ll walk you through a step-by-step procedure allowing you to unsync whatever you don¡¯t want Google to have, even if it¡¯s absolutely everything. The company also allows you to not just deactivate your Google accounts, but to delete any data the company has, in the very same place.
Between Google and Facebook, the former is clearly much more transparent with its data gathering, and has been for years. Heck, there¡¯s even a help page to walk you through every step of your security and privacy online, even privacy from Google. Unfortunately, even that may not be enough.For those well-acquainted enough with technology to feel comfortable exploring, finding these pages isn¡¯t too hard once you know where to look. For the uninitiated however, it can be incredibly intimidating. Even with the groupings and subdivisions for controls, it can get pretty hairy trying to navigate it all.
In addition, while all of this data gathering is to make Google services function better for you, there¡¯s an inherent immorality with keeping the harvesting options turned on by default. Sure, people have the option to turn it off, but they need to figure out how to. Then again, having them off by default and then trying to teach people how to turn on the data gathering options they approve of just handicaps the service. If Google marketed Maps as the only map you¡¯ll ever need, but kept location tracking and remembering off, you¡¯d pretty much just be using a regular map on a screen instead of paper. The same goes for Gmail, where you¡¯d have to either turn on the contact update feature, or just sit in front of your email with a handwritten address book.
Reuters
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what sort of tradeoff you¡¯re willing to make on your privacy for the sake of convenience. Once there¡¯s an established standard we can all agree on, we can make laws to prevent companies taking advantage of people who don¡¯t know enough to monitor the data they¡¯re giving out. But just crying #DeleteFacebook without understanding the underlying problem is like closing your curtains while leaving the front door open.