Privacy on the Internet has been a big topic lately, and one I’m certainly concerned about, so I figured I’d take advantage of Google’s “Takeout” feature to get an archive containing (supposedly) all of the data related to you that Google keeps on their servers. It took a couple of days for Google to prepare it, but I now have a 380MB zip file containing everything Google knows about me.
A lot of the contents aren’t that surprising, since it’s data that you’d expect Google to have. My gmail messages, my contact list, my map bookmarks, etc. And some stuff that makes sense but I’d forgotten about, like some quick-n-dirty spreadsheets I’d slapped together in Google Docs, or that one +1 I’d given in Google+ before never touching it again.
Where the really surprising stuff is though, is in the activity tracking. This includes:
- All of the web sites I’d visited where I’d seen a Google Ad, for up to five years back, way longer than my regular browser history.
- Every time I even just opened an app on my Android tablet, and what that app was, for up to three years back.
- My GPS location history, which you can also see here. Fortunately this is taken from my tablet, which has barely budged from its charging location in years now, but it would be a lot more invasive if I had an Android phone.
- Anything I’d even just browsed in the various Google stores (books, apps, movies, etc.)
- Which specific images I picked to view from an image search.
- Not just the map locations, but directions to places obtained through Google Maps.
- Search history going back for five years, longer than I’d expect based on autocomplete history.
- Oddly enough, it doesn’t include my Youtube history or activity, presumably because my Youtube account is a linked one from back before Google bought Youtube, so it’s still treated separately. They’re certainly still tracking my Youtube data, it’s just not included here.
It’s certainly eye-opening to finally see this kind of data, especially since I’m somewhat of a paranoid, private person who thought he was already being careful, and I’ll have to take another pass through various settings to see what can be tightened up a bit. It’s not like I have anything particularly nefarious to hide, but given a long enough history, somebody could probably spin a sinister-sounding story out of anyone’s data.
This is just one piece of the big picture, too, as there’s also data being collected by Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, etc. It’s a battle between privacy and convenience, though, and all too often, convenience wins.