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Comment by mhss | Hacker News Reader

> Google has tons of information on you

Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us? I work for Google now, but speak for myself here. In my time here (not much, less than a year still) I've seen a huge focus on privacy and not storing user data. Then again, I don't work on ads. However, even before working at Google I was surprised that given my liberal sharing of information on the internet, ad targeting did not seem particularly more informed for me than "middle aged male living in Canada" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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> what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?

For start, your entire search history. After you search, Google tracks how much time you spend on those sites with AdSense. Google reads our emails to scan for flights and to add appointments to calendar. It knows the places we go because Google Maps and the videos we watch online.

Google has plenty data to make an accurate profile of you, and you can see it’s inferences on your relationship status, income, employer and so on in your Google account[1]. (IIRC it was more complete some years ago, now it’s showing less categories or there’s another link I can’t find.)

[1]: https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155964...

> Do you have any good sources about this?

For example, documents in Google court cases: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592380225064960002 and https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592551401875734528 and https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21403202/google-engineers... and possibly others

The interesting thing about the Verge article, which comes across as being part of a pattern, is the deception and obfuscation around data collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

> NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

That they are not able to target you and others with ads worries me. I'm asking myself what are they doing with all this data they gather on people?

Regarding your point working at google, I don't think the entirety of google is evil. There have to be good people somewhere. But some parts are just evil.

> Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?

The list of Google handing tons of user data to governments or 3rd parties goes on and on. Clearly there is a lot for them to be handing over. Don't understand the surprise or confusion over what Google does.

...Access to Sci-Hub Founder’s Google Account Data (https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-gains-access-to-sci-hub-founder...).

Google handed over user data to the Hong Kong government (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-handed-ove...).

Google Hands Over User Data For 94%... (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/06/27/google...).

Google Bypasses Privacy, Puts Users’ Data on the Map (https://analyticsindiamag.com/google-bypasses-privacy-puts-u...).

Google’s ‘deceptive’ account sign-up process... (https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/29/google-account-gdpr-compla...).

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