“Last weekend I was at the hospital to get my blood pressure checked when a close friend, who had just arrived from Japan, invited me home. I went to his apartment straight from the hospital, and after a long session over the Saké he brought from Japan, we decided the hit the movie hall to watch Avengers: Infinity War. After the movie, we had dinner from a nearby Mexican Restaurant before heading back home.
On reaching home, I was kind of spooked when Google (GOOGL) showed me on my phone, the exact route I traveled that entire day on its Map application. I felt like a criminal who is constantly being monitored.”
The Cambridge Analytica scandal over Facebook (FB) data privacy issues is perhaps only the tip of the iceberg. Google handles a much bigger cache of information, right from your browsing preferences to the call history on your android phone. According to reports, Google has data on each of its users that could fill over 500,000 sheets!
Alphabet, which reported market-beating results on Monday, has access to more hoard of data that Facebook can’t collect. Google Analytics is probably the most significant analytics platform in the world, used by a majority of the gigantic corporates. The search giant tracks over 50 million sites and gleans information of people, who do not even have an account with the company, according to Wall Street Journal. Now compare that with Facebook, which has access to data belonging to its users only.
Forget the case of over a billion people who have Google accounts. The corporate knows more about you than anyone else in the world. Another interesting fact is that people often share more private information with Google — such a health conditions or sexual orientation — things that are not often explicitly shared on the social media.
The search giant tracks over 50 million sites and gleans information of people, who do not even have an account with the company, according to Wall Street Journal. Now compare that with Facebook, which has access to data belonging to its users only.
Separately, Google deals directly with a large number of data brokers, which collect information to create shadow profiles for the use of advertisers. Incognito mode hardly helps here. A data breach on the part of Google could end up as a much bigger disaster that eclipses the Facebook scandal.
Meanwhile, in the light of the Facebook scandal, the Mountain View, California-based tech giant had stated that it has strong policies in place, which are constantly reviewed, to protect the large chunk of data it handles. It has also said that sensitive information such as health, race and sexual orientation are not used at all. Meanwhile, the company stayed short of elaborating on any of the policies or review mechanisms it follows. Hell yeah! Something is confidential at the end of the day!