A Guardian reporter takes a look at all his data that Facebook and Google retain on him, and it's really scary. This really brings home the importance of the Cambridge Analytica story.
WHERE YOU'VE BEEN
Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. You can see a timeline of where you’ve been from the very first day you started using Google on your phone.
Click on this link to see your own data.
EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER SEARCHED OR DELETED
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
YOUR YOUTUBE HISTORY
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history
And that's not even including all the Facebook data. Go read the entire scary article. As Curran says:
They also have every image I’ve ever searched for and saved, every location I’ve ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I’ve ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I’ve made since 2009. And then finally, every YouTube video I’ve ever searched for or viewed, since 2008.
This information has millions of nefarious uses. You say you’re not a terrorist. Then how come you were googling Isis? Work at Google and you’re suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last 10 years. Manage to gain access to someone’s Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last 10 years.
This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos.
