Both companies build their empires on the most valuable commodity on earth: data. Information we give them access to every time we use their wonderful applications, which are almost always free. Well, when you don't pay for something online, it usually means that the product is you. In this case, your data: behavioral, consumer, personality, or contact information. Google and Facebook use this knowledge about you to provide a more personalized experience and create new, more tailored products; but also to become the main providers of information for the advertising industry.
What do Google and Facebook know about you
One can argue about the user benefit of this written, but unconscious, agreement. We've all agreed to lengthy legal texts without reading and understanding the breadth of the information we're sharing. In order to shed light and make us more aware of this agreement, I'm going to attempt in this post to reveal everything Google and Facebook know about you.
All the data Google has about you
Obviously, Google isn't limited to just its famous search engine. To understand its reach, you have to add all the data and interactions you make through Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, Google Play, Google+, Drive, YouTube, and Waze .
Google offers you a simple option to find out the whatsapp number list information it claims to use to show you ads —in my case, my gender, age range, and just about 70 topics that supposedly interest me, ranging from the arts to TV game shows… although I think the last one I saw was The Right Price. Very disappointing, Mr. Google.
However, if you exercise your legal right to access all your data with Google, you'll receive a database of files approximately 10 GB in size. This is truly mind-blowing, as all your activity appears logged and organized in its folder (see image).
Through these files, you can view every search you've done since 2007—every single one. It also obviously knows your phone number, email address, work address, friends, where you've taken your photos, and what newspapers or blogs you read. If you access your location history, it has the coordinates of every place you've been and can predict whether you were on foot, by train, or by car.
The YouTube section contains all the information about videos viewed or uploaded, all searches and comments, as well as metadata about how much time each video has been watched. And this is just the beginning; many of us have seen the power of its artificial intelligence assistant , capable of ordering a pizza on your behalf. A tool that constantly listens to what you say and can convert your voice instructions into structured data.
I must say I love Google products: whether it alerts me to traffic before I leave work or gives me personalized results. There comes a point where I almost expect it to read my mind, and whenever I use its search engine, I get impatient if it doesn't correctly complete my search after the second word. I understand this isn't everyone's opinion, but I'm happy to share my information with Google because it benefits my life.
All the data Facebook has about you
Facebook receives more than 2.5 million pieces of content every minute from its more than 2.2 billion users. However, Facebook is more modest than Google, and the data it acknowledges having about you is less astonishing. It claims not to cross-reference Facebook data with its other flagship, WhatsApp. Despite suspiciously recommending friends with people you only have in common after exchanging messages with them.