Mining Your Business

When technology writer Peter Griffin downloaded his personal data from Facebook and Google, it revealed a disturbing amount about the extent of his digital footprint.

Among the digital fragments that make up my massive archive of activity with Google, the most unnerving is my location data. Google knows everywhere I’ve been in the past decade. Whenever I had my Android smartphone with me, its GPS chip was recording and sending my co-ordinates, even trying to guess whether I was on a bike, in a car or on a train at the time.

Every one of the quarter-million emails I’ve sent and received since 2004, when I started using Google’s Gmail service, is there. Every chat conversation; every calendar appointment; every YouTube video I’ve watched. I regularly delete my internet search history, one of the data streams most valuable to Google, but it has plenty of other data points to determine exactly what makes me tick – and therefore what type of advertisements to put in front of me.

My 123MB Facebook archive is a fraction of the size of my 76GB Google file, but it, too, has a wealth of data on me: every message I’ve sent, photo I’ve posted, page I’ve liked; it knows where I logged into Facebook from and, most intriguingly, what advertisements I’ve clicked on over the years. Thus it has concluded that there are 337 ad categories I’m interested in and it seems to be right, since much of what I buy is on the basis of what appears in my newsfeed.

In short, two companies based in California have more intimate information on me than my own Government, my bank and even my own family. I agreed to all of this and so, probably, did you. This, as the US Congress members grilling Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill this month reminded us, is the price we pay for something that purports to be free.