Google even knows what you re thinking
Email Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url.
Clicking this link lets you see what Google thinks it knows about you based on your search history — and some of its predictions are eerily accurate
Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email.
Share icon An curved arrow pointing right.
Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting.
Twitter LinkedIn icon The word “in”.
LinkedIn Fliboard icon A stylized letter F.
Flipboard Facebook Icon The letter F.
Facebook Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email.
Email Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url.
- By clicking a link from Google’s account settings page, users can find out what the tech giant thinks it knows about them based on search history and browsing data from Google-owned sites like YouTube.
- Google guesses users’ age, gender, marital status, income bracket, and personal interests.
- Using the tool shows that many of Google’s predictions can be off-base, but the majority of them are scarily accurate.
- It’s also possible to stop Google from tracking your information or predicting your profile going forward.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in business, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley — delivered daily.
Loading Something is loading.
Thanks for signing up!
Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you’re on the go. download the app
Advertisement
Advertisement
When you use Google’s search function to learn about the world, Google is using your searches to learn about you.
The search giant builds multifaceted profiles of users based on their search history, as well as browsing history on Google-owned sites like YouTube. It uses that data to build an advertising profile, serving users with ads that it thinks will match their demographics.
By clicking a link from a Google account’s settings page, users can see what Google thinks it knows about them. Google predicts users’ age, gender, marital status, income, and personal interests.
The page also allows users to correct Google’s assumptions, remove their information from Google’s ad database, or stop Google from predicting their profile entirely going forward.
Advertisement
Advertisement
I sifted through my Google ad settings to learn what Google thinks it knows about me. Some of its predictions were off-base, but most were eerily accurate (and a few were comically specific based on recent Google searches I’ve made).
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to see what Google thinks it knows about you, and how to delete your information from Google’s database.
‘Google even knows what you’re thinking’
Privacy advocate Moxie Marlinspike used the spotlight of the SOURCE conference here to call attention to Google’s data harvesting practices, warning that the search engine giant can mine information to figure out even what Web surfers are thinking about.
Written by Ryan Naraine, Contributor on April 23, 2010
BOSTON — Privacy advocate Moxie Marlinspike used the spotlight of the SOURCE conference here to call attention to Google’s data harvesting practices, warning that the search engine giant can mine information to figure out even what Web surfers are thinking about.
During a presentation that discussed the changing threats to privacy, Marlinspike likened Google’s data collection to the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program and lamented that fact that it’s near impossible to avoid Google’s tentacles without “opting out of the social narrative.”
“They have an awful lot of data. They record everything. They have your IP address, your search requests, the contents of every e-mail you’ve ever sent or received. They know the news you read, the places you go. They’re even collecting real-time GPS location and DNS look-ups,” Marlinspike said.
“They know who you friends are, where you live, where you work, where you are spending your free time. They know about your health, your love life, your political leanings. They even know what you are thinking about,” Marlinspike added, warning that the company has found a way to control the terms of the privacy debate by offering what he described as fake anonymization.
GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:
- Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don’t require a login.
- Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to yo ur work flow.
- Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Add-on. He said the proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers.
The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.
This “GoogleShared” request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By “sharing” these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
Marlinspike said the GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities.
The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc. without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.
Marlinspike is also building a privacy tool to secure voice calls and SMS messages on mobile phones. That tool, called Whisper Systems, will offer secure dialing via Phil Zimmermann’s ZRTP protocol and an Off-The-Record derived system to secure the privacy of text messages.
The mobile tools, which is being built for Android, will be available in a few weeks from Marlinspike’s ThoughtCrime.org website.