9
votes
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior
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- Title
- How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
- Authors
- Longreads
- Published
- Sep 5 2019
- Word count
- 6549 words
Recently, I took the plunge and deleted my Google account. Before I did that, I made a request for all of the data they had on me via Google Takeout (both for backup purposes and out of curiosity). Some of it was obvious, like all the YouTube videos, the 480 Android apps I'd bought and all of my Google Voice message history.
But they also had all sorts of data I never expected. They had a log of how many steps I took each day and where from when I used an Android phone.
Some of the things I saw had (in my mind) no monetary value, but I can see why Google loves slurping up all this data. In 20 years it might be useful and can make them an extra few cents, so they might as well grab it.
This is one recent change I really dislike. I'd much rather pay what a service costs and not be the "product" that's sold to advertisers.
Sadly there is no way to view or delete your 3rd party/ shadow profile with any company.
I do wish there was some legislation akin to GDPR that regulated those types of profiles as well.