On Thursday August 4th, Chris led members on a tour through the Google services which collect information about you (“You” means people with a Google e-mail address) . We took a look at:
- Search: Google stores the terms you look for, and a history of the sites you visited.
- Gmail: “Although Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the company started showing shopping ads in Gmail. And it still scans emails to facilitate so-called smart features such as the ability to add holiday bookings or deliveries straight to your calendar, or to autocomplete suggestions. Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/09/how-private-is-your-gmail-and-should-you-switch
- Maps: Places you looked for, Routes you calculated, a timeline of where you ..(well, your phone) has been, reviews you made and places you liked. Go to Google Maps and click on the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) on the left to see your profile.
- Photos: If taken with a phone, where, what of (Google can recognise many things in images such as birds, sea, dogs etc., when the photo was taken (so it can offer you “On this Day” memories), photos you have liked and commented on.
- YouTube: Videos you have watched, topics searched for, videos you “liked”, the channels you follow, and of course it stores your personal videos if you upload them there.
- Translate: what you translated and which languages you used.
- Discover: Your interests revealed through this Android feature : “With Search, users enter a search term to find helpful information related to their query, but Discover takes a different approach. Instead of showing results in response to a query, Discover surfaces content primarily based on what Google’s automated systems believe to be a good match with a user’s interests. As a highly personalized feed, Discover actively tunes itself to a user’s interests and displays content that aligns with those interests. The content in Discover is automatically refreshed as new content is published, however Discover is designed to show all types of helpful content from across the web, not just newly published content”. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/google-discover
- Lens: The things you searched for with lens https://www.androidauthority.com/google-lens-guide-3183845/
Never fear! – You can manage and delete the information that Google stores about you by logging on to your Google account and visiting “My Google Activity” : https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
… its surprising how much stuff there is about you which Google stores on its servers. Stuff which you have probably forgotten about. The records go back years!
Christine Betterton-Jones – Knowledge Junkie