What does Google know about me?

Once upon a time, Google was a search engine and not much else. These days it’s one of the biggest companies in the world, often seen as the good guy with it’s unofficial slogan, “Don’t be evil,” endearing it to most people. (This slogan has recently been replaced with the more mundane “Do the right thing.”). Google now employees over 57,000 people globally, it’s rapid growth thanks to acquisitions, partnerships and a slew of both successful and failed products over the years.

In years gone by as we slowly made the switch to living our lives online, buying our first smartphone and opening our first social media account there was wariness about privacy and security. Although people are still concerned with privacy and cybercrimes such as identity theft, we’ve come to the conclusion that our online lives create a heap of data and for the most part, we’re okay with that as long as we have fast internet access, Wi-Fi and the worlds information at the swipe of our fingertips.

Google has been associated with search neutrality, tax avoidance, privacy concerns and censorship; just to name a few of its perceived crimes; but even so, we don’t seem to care. Google is the most visited website in the entire world, YouTube, also owned by Google sits second on the list. We could live without Google as easily as we could live without our smartphones (in other words – we couldn’t).

There are some things we expect Google to know, like our search history, but other things like everywhere we’ve ever been – may not be so expected. How you use Google products will affect how much Google knows about you but chances are, you are using more than one or even more than two, three or four of the below products:

Google+

These are just a snapshot of some of Google’s most popular products. Think you don’t use them? What about when you’re sent a link to a Google Doc file? Or invited to a meeting via Google Hangouts? Ever been shared something on Google+? Installed Chrome? Used the Play Store? Viewed something on YouTube? Thought so. Google is a mainstay in our lives whether we want it to be or not and it collects our data from every single touch point we have with one of their products.

Majority of people have a Gmail account, or a work associated Google account (for Google Analytics, Adwords and/or Docs), a YouTube account or a Play account. Whether we think Google is the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the guy – it’s everywhere and we use it every day purposefully or inadvertently.

So what does Google know about me?

To find out exactly what Google knows about you, you need to be logged into your Google account (you know you have one) and visit https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity.

If it’s your first time visiting My Activity you will be greeted with a series of reassuring pop-ups from Google that promise you own your data and it’s simply collected to make your user experience better. Awesome, thanks google!

In the list you will find all your browsing and session history, as well as all your YouTube browsing history divided by either the topic you typed in the search bar or by Google product such as:

• Maps
• Gmail
• Chrome
• Search
• Ads
• YouTube
• Image Search

In order to delete your data, you can only do it on a day-by-day basis, which could take you a very long time. To delete, click on the three dots at the start of the daily bundled view and select delete. An warning information pop up will double check if you really want to delete your data as it’s only used to make your Google experience better (or the Ads more annoying?).

Rest assured, deleting your data will have very little effect on your Google user experience. 

Google knows everywhere you've been

The left-hand menu displays several options. Selecting Other Google Activity will take you to a list of other products that collect your data. Location Services can sometimes be the most alarming one if you have them turned on. Again, a reassuring pop-up is displayed on your first visit letting you know that location services are super fun because you get to see everywhere we’ve ever been and take a trip down memory lane.

There are a couple of handy features in Location Services though, including an option to delete all of your location history at once (rather than day by day). Google will let you know that some of your apps may stop working properly if you do so.

Take control of your data

Want to know EVEYRTHING Google knows about you? In Location Services, again click on the gear icon and choose ‘Download a copy of my data’. Google will send you a copy of ALL the data it has on you. Examining this document will help you decide if you’re happy with what they are saving or if you want to change it.

To change what data Google collects, visit Activity Controls and toggle on or off the different services that are collecting your data. At the very bottom of this page click on Ads Settings to see your ad customisations and what Google thinks you are interested in based on your search history. There are a few Ad options to choose from in the small print at the bottom.

 Above: What google thinks I'm interested in, some of these are really far off the mark. 

Next steps

Maybe looking at what Google knows about you, will be a fun exercise for some. Alarming, for others. There are a few things you can do to protect yourself if privacy is a concern to you. As above, toggling off certain services is the first thing to do and you could look into a search engine that doesn’t track you like DuckDuckGo.

Remember, everything we ever do on the internet will be saved somewhere. It doesn’t matter if you untag yourself in photos, delete embarrassing photo albums or search history, the data still exists somewhere. Whether your data is collected by Google, your telco or another software company (which it probably is) you’re accountable for your actions and you should only act in a way that doesn’t put you under scrutiny.