The modern confessional

HOW DOES GOOGLE KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU – AND EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD? BECAUSE WE TELL IT, SAYS STEPHEN CORBY.

- STEPHEN CORBY

I know this is difficult to hear, but don’t take it personally. You are a liar. To be fair, we all are.

Have you ever done a survey? You probably had no reason to lie, but did you? Research shows many people play down embarrassing behaviours and even thoughts in surveys, even when they know their answers are anonymous.

Then there are the lies we tell ourselves – we will go for that run tomorrow, give up drinking, refuse all hot chips – and about ourselves.

In one typical US survey, 40 per cent of a company’s engineers said they were in the top 5% of employees. One-quarter of senior high school students in America would rank themselves in the top 1% of performers.

There is one place, however, that we all tell the truth, or at least let it sneak out – the great blinking bright confessional box that is the internet, and Google in particular.

Just think about the questions you’ve tapped into Google that you were too afraid to ask anyone else, not to mention the ones your children have asked, or even the ones your partner has put to the unflappable but fallible browser about you.

POWER IN DATA

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a former Google data scientist, economist, author and philosopher who describes Google searches as “the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche”.

His studies of reams of Google searches have revealed everything from the fact that December 25th is the least depressing day of the year to just how deeply sexist humans are when it comes to the hopes and fears they have for their children. And how body-obsessed we all are.