Digital Privacy
Ever had a popup that looks like this?
You’re being tracked, and you’re not the only one.
Sites use cookies to track you across sites. These cookies are often powered by third parties, such as Google and Facebook. Users are now considered unpaid ‘digital labors’, as one pays for ‘free’ services through the loss of their privacy.
Between 2005 and 2011, the levels of disclosure for profile information on Facebook have been decreasing, showing that people want to keep more information private. However, in the same time, Facebook gained a profit of $100 billion through the collection and sharing of their users’ data to third-party advertisers.
Types of Privacy
There are three types of privacy: Information, Communication, and Individual.
Information Privacy
Individuals should have the freedom to decide how their digital information is collected, processed, and used.
Communication Privacy
Individuals should have the freedom to communicate information online safely and securely at all times.
Individual Privacy
Individuals should have the freedom to exist freely on the internet, meaning they can choose what type of information they share, are exposed to, and that unwanted information
What DO they know?
To find out what information is out there on me, I used Google’s Takeout service, which allows you to download a copy of your data from Google. I have to be honest, I am a bit skeptical if this is all of the data they have on me, but it’s worth looking at regardless.
Depending on how much data they have saved, it can take a while to download. I had to wait about a day or so for the download links to become available. When I downloaded and extracted the files, I was surprised to see how much data they had on me. The extracted zip file was around 15GB, and it contained a lot of data. I was able to find my search history, location history, YouTube history, and more.
Below is the breakdown of what data was inside the Takeout export. Including YouTube videos I have uploaded, I downloaded 18.93GB of data on myself. Excluding the files I uploaded on Drive, YouTube, and Google Photos (which is the majority of the data I downloaded, as they total 17.86GB) there was 0.51GB of other data I generated (From using Gmail, adding contacts, etc). The remaining 1.03GB of files that Google had generated on me by tracking my internet history, which are all text files.
As shown, excluding my file uploads, around two thirds of the data Google has on me are log files. I went through each of them to find out what they contained, and this is the breakdown. A few of the folders are empty, as I never used those services from Google, so they are barely visible on the chart. The few folders I am more concerned about, however, are the ‘Hangouts’, ‘Location History’, ‘My Activity’, and the ‘Google Chat’ folders.
Hangouts
Is it really necessary for Google to keep a record of every photo I have ever sent in Hangouts, long after I have deleted the conversations they were sent in? I don’t think so, especially since I haven’t used Hangouts in years, and it is no longer supported as of November 2022.
Location History
Location history is a useful feature, but keeping an extremely detailed record of everywhere I have been as far back as 2016? Especially exact coordinates, which can be used to pinpoint my location to within a few feet? That feels like a bit much, don’t you think?
My Activity
Sure, you need logs. But what is concerning is the fact that they have logs of every single action you have ever taken on Google: Pages visited, articles read, Drive files downloaded, and all of my search history. And here we were, thinking clearing your browser history was safe.
Google Chat
Again, similarly to the Hangouts Photos, keeping a record of every chat message sent in your conversations, even after the chat has been deleted on your end, is not something I am comfortable with
Reflection
Some user data is required to make services usable. I get that, and understand that. What makes me uneasy is the fact that the default settings for what they keep on you is ‘Anything and Everything.’ With Takeout, it is nice to be able to see most of the data they have on you, though it definitely isn’t a comforting kind of nice.
This data allows Google, or the companies it sells its services to, to create a profile on you that can learn your habits. They can then use this for whatever they conceivably want. This individualized data is what allows companies to personalize your experience on their platforms, tailoring what you see on their service so you stay on their platform longer.
There have also been many complaints over Google Takeout, one such criticism is that keeping the takeout data available for too short a time for many users with large files to easily download everything before the batch expires, in essence “trapping” users with large data and slow bandwidth in Google’s services. I don’t use Google services much, so this didn’t affect me much, but I can see how this would be a problem for many.
See this info displayed as a more interactive experience here.
