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What does Google Know about You?

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Gord_in_Toronto
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Jul 22, 2006
Messages
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I got a video and a news article describing how Google saves all your searches, and data mines your Gmail and Gdocs with a computer algorithm, in order to figure out what ads to serve you. The article also mentions that you can look at your entire search history in your Google account settings. Not much new news there.
 
BazBear said:
I got a video and a news article describing how Google saves all your searches, and data mines your Gmail and Gdocs with a computer algorithm, in order to figure out what ads to serve you. The article also mentions that you can look at your entire search history in your Google account settings. Not much new news there.
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The operative bit of the entire article is of course: "As long as you’ve been logged in". I've been using the search engine for as long as it has been around, and I have never logged into anything, nor do I have any idea why anyone would want to. I don't know what Gdocs is. And they can target as many ads at me as they like, I probably won't see them. Back when I still did see ads, I was always amused that the targeting of internet advertising is so sophisticated they can't even figure out something as basic as what language to use in ads directed to someone in Belgium, based solely on IP address, the hardest bit of information they have on me. Or what the city I live in is called, despite that information also being easily available based on IP address. Another one I found amusing is that the Guardian website seemed to assume for a long time that I was a British expat in need of financial advice. The sophisticated algorithm must be: Not-in-the-UK + Reads-stuff-about-the-UK = UK-expat = Probably-has-some-money.

The upshot seems to be: Google stores all the information you give to Google for free, so they can make money off it. I assume it's news to some people.
 
FromBelgiumWithLove said:
The operative bit of the entire article is of course: "As long as you’ve been logged in". I've been using the search engine for as long as it has been around, and I have never logged into anything, nor do I have any idea why anyone would want to. I don't know what Gdocs is. And they can target as many ads at me as they like, I probably won't see them. Back when I still did see ads, I was always amused that the targeting of internet advertising is so sophisticated they can't even figure out something as basic as what language to use in ads directed to someone in Belgium, based solely on IP address, the hardest bit of information they have on me. Or what the city I live in is called, despite that information also being easily available based on IP address. Another one I found amusing is that the Guardian website seemed to assume for a long time that I was a British expat in need of financial advice. The sophisticated algorithm must be: Not-in-the-UK + Reads-stuff-about-the-UK = UK-expat = Probably-has-some-money.

The upshot seems to be: Google stores all the information you give to Google for free, so they can make money off it. I assume it's news to some people.
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Gdocs is Google Documents, their online office etc. type service.
 
theprestige said:
What's the conspiracy theory?
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That's what I'm trying to figure as well.

Google exists
It collects information
It stores information
It makes its own rules

Seems like the thread should be in social issues or computers.
 
theprestige said:
That's not an implied conspiracy, it's an obvious truth, and the purposes are well known and well understood.
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Exactly. That's where the "for purposes unknown" comes in. Google is just a bunch of people very openly wanting to make money. It does this by pretending to have loads of information about pretty much everyone, which it doesn't really have. It's only if there were people who think there are further more nefarious purposes behind that endeavour, and that Google's pretensions to having all that information are genuine, that it could, perhaps, become a conspiracy theory.

Let me put it another way:

As long as Google, or any other web outfit for that matter, can't even figure out basic, public stuff like what my primary language is, or what my home city is called in the several languages they use for ads supposedly "targeted" at me on the basis of earlier browsing behaviour, I figure my privacy is pretty safe. I also figure that Google is just, very successfully, selling internet hot air on a massive scale. What in the olden day us geeks called vaporware.
 
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I realized Google knows too much when Google Now appeared unasked for on my phone, told me where I was, where I was going, and how long it would take to get there. And I'm not making any of that up.

On the other hand, it continues to ask "Are you interested in cricket?" because my wife looked up the player who was killed by being hit by a pitch several months ago. And doesn't provide me a means of saying "no".
 
Trebuchet said:
I realized Google knows too much when Google Now appeared unasked for on my phone, told me where I was, where I was going, and how long it would take to get there. And I'm not making any of that up.

On the other hand, it continues to ask "Are you interested in cricket?" because my wife looked up the player who was killed by being hit by a pitch several months ago. And doesn't provide me a means of saying "no".
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Give in, be interested in cricket. Who are you to gainsay the mighty Google?
 
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