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Comment by eslachance | Hacker News Reader

It can probably build a very extensive list of skills (what languages you know, spoken or programming), preferences (habits, sexual, etc), hobbies, a full social network map (from emails and social networks), character (from analyzing emails, searches, etc), amongst other things.

I'm not necessarily saying that this data is already compiled somewhere - but Google being a data-oriented company, they could most likely do all this if they really wanted to.

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They do have that data, and you can see it:

http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/

(not sure the links work, you get there through the dashboard)

That is far less than what Google's recommender system actually knows. But it is open question to an outsider whether Google interprets what it knows, or of the knowledge is all a pike of correlation matrices that are opaque until the ads pop out.

Why would they let you see all their data unless there is a legal obligation to do so? It would just freak people out and they'll start looking for ways to anonymize or find and use another search engine/email/etc.

In other words given all their options and incentive they don't seem to get any benefits from really exposing all the data they have about you. One can argue that is really they most precious resource.

They have some incentive to expose some to make you feel like you are somewhat in control and they are somewhat open and transparent.

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