What Google and Facebook know about you

Google and Facebook almost knows everything a smartphone owner does online or offline and store the information even if the owner deletes the data on the device. They store everything without you even realizing it.

Google knows 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.

Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted

Google stores search history across all your devices on a separate database. This means even the data that user has deleted in their search history and phone history on their devices, Google still stores everything until user go in and delete everything.  

Google has an advertisement profile of you

Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.

Google knows all the apps you use

Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.

Google has all of your YouTube history

Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal...

The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents

Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. File size could be up to 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents.

The data includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google …

They also have data from your calendar, your Google hangout sessions, your location history, the music you listen to, the Google books you’ve purchased, the Google groups you’re in, the websites you’ve created, the phones you’ve 0wned, the pages you’ve shared, how many steps you walk in a day …

And What About Facebook

Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information. This includes every message you’ve ever sent or been sent, every file you’ve ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you’ve sent or been sent to you.

Facebook stores everything from your stickers to your login location

Facebook also stores your interest area based on the things you’ve liked and what you and your friends talk. They also store all the stickers you’ve ever sent on Facebook. They also store the log in data-when you logged in, logged out, where you logged in from and from what device.

And they store all the applications you’ve ever had connected to your Facebook account to detect users internet areas – politics, sports, music, news etc.

They can access your webcam and microphone

The data they collect includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your emails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive, the files you download, the games you play, your photos and videos, your music, your search history, your browsing history, even what radio stations you listen to.

Facebook Likes to show you ads

Facebook’s algorithm even captures the pages you like and your friends talk about to figure out what ads to show you. Facebook also determines user's political affiliation based on their activity on platform. 

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.

Facebook’s propaganda that “We extend you the control to share as part of our mission to make the world more open and connected” is basically a framework to collect the user data. Facebook has always enabled and encouraged this system of data collection under the pretext of user empowerment.

But the organization that has invested billions of monies in acquisition and spend heavily in everything from virtual reality to drones can get distinctive things done when it wants to. Currently Facebook has approximately 25000 employees and generating more than $40 billion in revenue during 2017. It’s the same organization that was aware about the Cambridge Analytics data abuse in 2005 and didn’t bother to act on it until it was reported by media.

You can’t be invisible on the internet, but you have to be conscious about what’s happening behind your back. Every time a company asks you to tap OK, think about what’s behind this popup. You can’t say that nobody told you.