11mo ago

I am genuinely horrified to see how much data google collected from me

I created a google takeout and in that zip file I found some files containing a ton of data about me. It has logged every single page I visited while using the google search engine and chrome browser. It even logged every single time I opened an app on my old android phone. It even has VOICE RECORDINGS of me and a log of every time I used google assistant. This is just some of the data and I'm very sure there is even more data they have.

180 comments

How do you think they are able to pay the bills of those expensive af services for free?

Fortunately you can degoogle many Android phones. And stop using big tech products in general. They have a lot of issues, not only a complete lack of privacy
- I might be looking into a new phone soon, what do you suggest?
  
  A pixel, if you buy into GrapheneOS being the pinnacle of security. Otherwise, anything with an unlockable bootloader and LineagOS support.
  
  Ironically enough, Google Pixels are great phones if you need to de-google with GrapheneOS.
  
  GrapheneOS is amazing
  
  If you want a normie phone that you can install a privacy-focused OS on, Google Pixel is a surprisingly good option. Just take a look at the LineageOS's and GrapheneOS's officially supported devices lists before purchasing a specific model. You can also choose Xiaomi or Motorola but you won't be able to lock the bootloader with a custom OS installed on that phones which can create some vulnerabilities. If you want to run Linux on your phone though, you either need a PinePhone or a OnePlus 6 series
  
  Look for DivestOS supported devices. What I cannot recommend is Fairphone. Several Hardware issues, support refuses to accept them. The support in general is horrible.
  Kind regards
  A Fairphone 4 user with /e/OS
  
  Look at which devices are supported my grapheneos, calyxos, /e/os and ubuntu touch/droidian and get the newest one of those that you can afford. Usually a google pixel (ironically) but also fairphone are well supported and are better IMO.
  
  Get a Pixel and install a custom ROM. Any ROM is fine, just dont install gapps. You actually have to go out of your way to install google crap. By default a new install is google-free
  
  I bought a fairphone 4 awhile ago from Murena, the only US distributor. Other phones have more bells and whistles but I feel better knowing I can repair it if something goes wrong. If you're in Europe the FP5 is a good bet but I don't think anyone is selling them in North America. I don't know about distribution elsewhere.

They may even save every Google meet meeting for all we know. They may train their AI on how our faces look in meetings.
Nothing is too creepy for Google.
- Why would they need that? There is plenty of your face on Google photos.
  
  For you, maybe. Mine is filled with black screen pocket photos, furry porn, and 714 copies of a video of a horrifying mecha furby that's stepping on its own removed face.
  Another copy shows up every time I have a nightmare about it, which is pretty odd, now that I think about it.
  
  Why would they need that? Let me introduce you to Big Data.
- The faces training was all of the filters. Every single time someone took a video or picture and used filters to add cute moe eyes, or make themselves look like a crab, it was being used to make whichever company was doing it have a better bottom line or to accelerate their facial recognition.

don't forget if you have location enabled in your phone it tracks every single place you've been to
- It does that even if you turn it off. The setting just controls location access by third party apps.
  Lineage os and F-droid is the better solution. It has the advantage of being bloat free as well
  
  You can also use GPS location without any google services running, it just takes a bit longer to find your position when you first connect. OsmAnd or Organic maps from f-droid, which are actually superior apps to google maps in a lot of ways, particularly OsmAnd.
- And it can be very wrong about those locations, too. For better or worse, idk. My old phone showed me going to completely different cities on the other side of my state when I went to the corner store.

What's even scarier is that takeout is probably only the data they want you to see, or are legally obliged to share.
I would be willing to wager they have lots more on you that you're not even aware of.
- including everything they see through our front camera and rear cameras 😱
  
  Idk about that. What data could they get with that, that they can't already get through other (cheaper) means, that would justify all the network traffic and storage space?

Just imagine what Microsoft and Apple are getting thru telemetry
- You do realize that Google is far worse than Apple and Microsoft combined right?
  
  Not really although its hard to objectively prove anything
  
  I see it as good reason to distance myself from all of these mega data harvesting corporations to the best of my ability. Same goes for meta and tiktok. Why bicker about which is worst when they all are varying degrees of terrible?
  
  "ghengis Khan killed more people than Hitler ya know, right?"
  
  This is entirely speculation on your part.
  Google has been more transparent that it happens. Apple is definitely collecting information on everything you do on their devices as well. It may be just as much info.
  With their new pay later feature, you know they are at least collecting enough info to make financial decisions based on your profile.
  They also collect health data using the watch.
  They collect more than that in order to better understand how to keep people in their ecosystem. I'd wager the latter will about cover what OP was surprised by Google capturing.
  Microsoft is another story. They are the most valuable tech company in the world right now due to AI. Which indicates that they are training some powerful AI on data that has been gathered in a number of places.
  
  Doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft and Apple's market share on PC which is what I was thinking of.
  Besides, it wasn't like I was saying Google's mobile telemetry is less invasive on Android, where they compete with Apple for being as creepy as possible. IIRC windows phones haven't taken off
- Fucking whataboutism. Apple and Microsoft aren’t ad companies. They’re hardware and software companies. They don’t have to collect data on you to literally make any money, Google does. If Google doesn’t track everything you do they’re incapable of making money. The same is absolutely not true for ms and Apple.
  
  Whataboutism? Where did I say this makes what Google is doing better? They all work together. God you people are dense.
  Microsoft and Apple absolutely are ad companies lmfao.
  
  The point of calling ou twhataboutism is that we should condemn both of them
- Of all three, Google has the most skin in that game, for what it’s worth, IMHO. They’re an advertising company first and foremost, and it shows in all of their products’ feature sets and privacy policies.
  But we also can’t trust either of them lol
- Data has become even more valuable with AI. All big tech outfits are incentivised to collect it now. Combine that with them being able to and you're left just having to trust them. If you plan to use their stuff that is.
- Google is by far the worst offender. Their business model is based on collecting this data. Microsoft wants this to be their business model too. Apple just wants to sell you devices, and they are promoting themselves as privacy friendly, I’m sure they’re making some effort to avoid collecting data they don’t need.
  
  Apple is only promoting themselves as a privacy company to try to get VPN customers to move to their iCloud plus and shit. It's like Micro$oft moving into open source. I really don't think it's ever wise to take a company's philosophy seriously it's just a way to manage customer and employee expectations temporarily.

Friends don't let friends use Google and meta. show those you care about what you have discovered. don't lecture them just make them aware, share your findings.
- Also for a good read on Google and Meta, check out Jedi Blue. It's a plan that FB and Google got sued for, for manipulating ad auction timings in favor of FB on Google in exchange for FB to promise to not open a competing ad service plans. They also gave FB access to every google device with Facebook (preinstalled esp) on it. The name Jedi Blue is a reference to the Jedi mind trick, assholes.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's the same with all the big data companies. Everything you type, say or do gets logged and never deleted.
- It could be they are collecting and hiding the data, but what they publicly disclose they have certainly varies. My de-google-fication really started when I used google takeout (like the OP here). Excluding things I wanted backed up (e.g. photos), Google still had more than a GB of textual data (this was 7 years ago or so—my memory may be wrong). I use Apple a lot so I went to their “takeout” page. They had a few MB of data pretty much all of which I considered innocuous. I don’t think they are equivalent.
  I do agree Facebook probably collects as much data as Google, but I gave that up long ago.
- That's why I'm still in doubt wether to use my fingerprint to unlock my phone. Would be convenient, but where is it stored, who can access it?
  
  Stored locally
  
  Anybody with access to your finger, which means they don't need you to be conscious or even alive to access your phone.
  
  Smart for many reasons as people listed here. Your fourth amendment rights to your phone also go out the window when you use biometrics like fingerprint. PIN/password is protected, fingerprint/face scan is not. Backwards world we're in, huh?
- Its not everything. Thats hyperbolic. Metadata is usually more profitable then the data itself.
  
  Not literally everything. But if you're sending unencrypted data via internet, even data you may not be aware of. It's likely being stored by some company.

while, yes, regardless of your privacy settings google still collects a sickening amount of data on you, much of these things (like voice recordings and location history) can be managed and disabled in the settings. if you wish to go further, grapheneos removes A LOT of tracking potential.
these should be opt in features, but one can opt out of much of them.
- How is it not zero on Graphene??
  
  well if you have play services installed then google is gonna get some data on you.
- So does CalyxOS

Today you learned a valuable lesson:
When an online service is free it generally means you're the product.
- Today companies will snoop your info even if you pay 1000s for a device.
  Why wouldn't they, obviously no one cares
- It's [current year], nobody is learning that lesson today. We've all known it for well over a decade now.
- It's not even online only anymore. You can't do the setup process of Android OR Windows without connecting to the Internet, and I doubt Apple's products are any better in that regard.

Yeah, anyone who's never done this really should. It's eye-opening to see it go from a theoretical discussion to "HOLY SHIT THEY HAVE ALL MY DATA" in real-time.

Have you been under a rock?
- I'm really not a fan of such gatekeeping rhetoric.
  Congrats on already knowing stuff, I guess. The vast majority of people don't have the ability, will or exposure to engage with most technical stuff, especially since the concept of (digital) privacy still is surprisingly controversial.
  We all benefit from more people caring about privacy. Comments like yours achieve the exact opposite and don't provide any value at all to the conversation.

What's a Google takeout?
- takeout.google.com
  Everything they have on you.
  
  Everything they're willing to tell you they have on you.
- It’s Google’s name for a service that lets you download all the data Google has on your account. If you google google takeout it should get you to the page.
- https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190

Google has a data privacy setting that lets you delete your data history at some intervals. The lowest is 3 months last I checked. Make sure to use it.
- So that would delete all the information that OP listed above?
  
  Yes. You can select what to delete and what to retain if I recall correctly. It’s grouped by “activities”, by app if you will.

I really don't understand why you find this surprising. We're you expecting like...42% of all that to be saved?
- To be fair, it wasn't something most of us were thinking about in the early 2000's
  Then Google became ubiquitous, to the point where we didn't question it. Like cell service
  
  That's very true. But not really by the time Android started.
- Don't be so harsh we all gotta learn eventually. His moment is now brethren!

How do you do this?
I have a few dozen google accounts, but most of them I'm locked out of. Even if I enter the correct username and password on the first try, google says I can't login because I never associated a phone number to the account.
How can I get this data?
- takeout.google.com
  
  That only works if you can log in. Otherwise, it would be a massive privacy problem since anyone could takeout anyone's data.
  
  That tells me to login
- Have the same issue on one of my accounts. I can login but when I try to do anything, I need to verify by getting a code over SMS. The thing is, the phone number on that account is an old one I don't have access to anymore. There is no other verification option, I can't delete it from my account without verification and I'm definitely not adding my actual number.
- Probably a GDPR data request
  
  Hmm, wouldn't that make it worse? Because then you have to give your real name, no?

I rarely interact in any meaningful way with anything in Google's ecosystem these days. I'm still tied by a couple little whispy threads, but nothing serious. I'm running GrapheneOS with no Google apps, switched my email to Proton, switched to Firefox, search with Brave, use a NAS for cloud storage, and browse YouTube anonymously with NewPipe. Occasionally I'll get an email on one of my old Gmail addresses, but other than that I feel like I've sufficiently deGoogled enough to feel safe.
- What do you do for maps/navigation?
  
  OsmAnd and Organic Maps. They're both not as good as Google Maps. But at least when I use them Google doesn't get to know that I traveled 15km across town to fuck a Tinder thot and buy bread.
- This! I genuinely love my phone now that's never happened before.

I gave up caring years ago when I realized it was way too late to undo it all. If Google really cares that I'm a gamer then oh well, at least my ad blockers work just fine and I use Firefox so that's good enough.
- It is never too late. Free yourself from this abusive relationship, it feels fantastic.
  
  Free yourself from what exactly? I think you’d be surprised at how much everything else is tracking you still.
  All for what, avoiding ads you’ll get anyway?

I just deleted my google account. Bye YouTube comments.
- I wish I could just delete it. I'm still figuring out things with nextcloud and I run a youtube channel so I can't do that yet.
  
  If the only reason you’re keeping it is to make and post YouTube videos, it doesn’t sound like you wish you could delete it.
  
  @sidgames5 @trippingonthewire Is there a more privacy-friendly option (non-data siphoning) for video hosting?
  
  You could create an Odysee channel perhaps, and try to migrate there. Then you're supporting competition.
- You're really not missing out. I swear 90% of the youtube comments I end up getting are from hardcore nazis.
- Wish I could do that too but my email is still tied to some accounts where I can't change it
  
  You can't change the email you use? Are you open to deleting those accounts, and maybe making new ones? Or saying goodbye to those platform's for good? Customer service could help you change emails, perhaps.