Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I just found out how much Google knows about me…”.
Okay, let me show you something: there is a portal you can visit, which shows you all the info that Google has both gathered and predicted about you and it’s kind of scary. So I’m now on the page, Jan at the top there’s a couple of things like my age, my gender and that’s fair enough that stuff that I’ve entered myself. But then you’ve got this gigantic list of interests and the scary / intriguing thing is just how specific it is. Oh is mentioning to someone on a Google Hangouts chat the other day about a potential holiday to Greece, and here it is flagged as one of my interests. They must have clocked on it’s my Netflix activity.
That would explain how it knows the type of TV that I watch. It’S even picked up on my obsession with customisation, and so it knows to target me with services related to personalization. A few things aren’t right like parenting. Well, I hope not anyway, but I think what it’s doing here is projecting.
Google is looking at my current buttons and it’s predicting that parenting is or will soon be an interest for me. So this triggered a bit of a thought process. For me, most people watching this are probably using at least 20 services owned by Google, but the scary things start to happen when you merge the knowledge that it gains from these various platforms. For example, YouTube comments.
Google publicly states that they keep track of every single youtube comment: you’ve ever left, which is fine right, because most people use YouTube under some sort of anonymous identity. So nobody knows who you are right. Google does Google knows exactly who you are.
They know which smartphone you’ve commented from. They know your real name because of all the other stuff you do on this phone and they know where you live. This might all seem pretty obvious, but I’ve seen a lot of people writing comments as if they were 100 %, anonymous and invincible.
When really Google has a permanent record of it, so I just be careful what you write online. Here’S another thing: if you think about when people are most unashamedly themselves, it’s when they’re on their own, which is also usually when you’re going to be looking things up, watching videos that you like, or in other words, sending information to Google. It’S perfectly possible, then that in some ways Google knows you better than your family and your friends you’re not going to tell your family that you’re secretly into Minecraft videos at the age of 23 and you’re not going to ask your friends to check a lump you’ve. Just found on your body, Google is who you please share the information with and to clarify.
We know that Google collects this information, we consent to it, but it’s kind of crazy how powerful that becomes when it accumulates. Google could recognize you better than your own mother. Think about this, you take a selfie on your phone.
Google photos knows from the image data that this is a selfie and therefore a photo of you, the algorithm, then trains itself to become better and better at recognizing you every time you take a photo to the point where now, for me, Google knows I’m in a Photo even if I’m a tiny obscured face in the background – and it knows exactly how I sound if you think about how you set up Google assistant. The first thing you do is train it to recognize your voice and just like the Photos app, it learns more about the nuances of my speech. Each time I interact with it.
In fact, Google stores an online recording of every interaction I’ve ever had with my assistant, which is super creepy. So when I found this archive, I was listening to clips of myself in 2017, asking it what the weather was, but maybe the most invasive part of this is the location timeline. Google keeps track of every town, city and country you’ve been to how long you spent there and exactly which places you end up visiting. It knows that the last time I was in Paris, I took an 11 minute walk from the shores Alizee to my hotel. Every 30 seconds, or so for the rest of your life, your smartphone or whatever the future equivalent looks like we’ll be beaming your exact location to Google.
So all of this has I’d say three quite severe implications. Number one is that it is vital that you protect your Google account, there’s a bit of a misconception that if someone manages to hack you, then the worst they can do is fire off a few dodgy emails. No, this person has access to essentially your entire preferences and personality, your friends, your family, your location, they can effectively download you number two.
Whilst Google does have an immense amount of power here, there are hundreds of governing bodies that prevent them, exploiting it and so for almost all of us, it still makes sense to trust the company, given how much easier it makes our lives and number three with this Much information Google faces a bit of a moral dilemma. Whilst your data is not being shared as part of the company’s core ethos, there are a lot of cases where it might actually benefit society. For that data to be shared, google could pick up on where a criminal is hiding, it could predict which people are at risk of self-harm and it could start flagging potential terrorists just based on their search history, all right guys. Thank you so much for watching.
I really hope you enjoyed the video and, if you did don’t forget to subscribe for more, my name is Aaron. This is mr. he’s the boss, I don’t catch you in the next one. You .