Google knows you better than you and your family

FB captures as much with its one SN portal and IM app

Yet my google home still can't tell me and my partner apart ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Forgot about all your purchases - every purchase confirmation is sent to your gmail address, isn't it?
https://myaccount.google.com/purcha...

@Milu are you sure?

Oh no not my prodects

@asgs Sure about what? I mean you might not use gmail account or sth. But I'm using mine for years now and was slightly shocked when I found list containing all my purchases.
Now that I think about it it isn't that surprising.... The data is there. Just wouldn't think that they would go and parse all that...

@Milu They parse everything.

I order groceries from the local supermarket online for delivery (I'm a lazy fuck without a car), and from the receipt in my mail Google knows what I bought. I got a notification on Android from Google Now, when a news site posted that a product I bought was mislabeled and posed an allergy danger.

My employer cooperates with Google on AI (tensorflow & TPUs), and Google pretends to be dumber on purpose to not freak people out.

They're running lab tests to analyze your sleep pattern from screen time, phone movement and alarm clock settings. I've participated in a demo which (correctly) identified a health issue from the sound of my voice. An engineer showed me an experiment which estimated income from google searches, recorded purchases and your streetview house facade.

They've shown me a search demo where a search query gets placed in an extremely personalized context (for a coworker it analyzed "cherry" in the context of lipstick and a red dress she bought, for me it led to cherrywood in a Minecraft modpack and YouTube carpenting videos)

Google's DNA drives them towards analyzing & categorizing all information. While they work for advertisers, most of it is in service of the user, because they know they must keep the user happy.

But it does in the end mean that we voluntarily choose a benevolent babysitter whose ultimate goal is to leech money from your wallet. Is it a valuable symbiosis, or a parasitic relationship?

They know a parasite should never drain too much, death of the host is death of the leech. They know they shouldn't harm the host, because they'd be cut out... But they do know that with enough analgesics they can bite pretty hard.

Maybe it will all turn out OK... Maybe not.

@Milu I've been using it for more than 10 years and the purchase list shows up empty.

I don't know if it is a country thing or what

@asgs Huh... Maybe? Mine has 100s if not thousands of positions going over 4 years back. From different sites, shops and auction sites. Maybe you disabled some sort of privacy thing?

Google contacts track contacts.
Hangouts track could location, conversations, attachments, online time, etc.

Get your fucking facts

@Milu what a fucker I am. I was having my work (gmail) account selected in the switcher initially

Oh, God

Good thing I use none of those things (although Amazon can probably predict the names of my future grandchildren)

@bittersweet thanks a bunch for the Insights.
And I agree, it's a very thin line in which direction it will go - parasite or symbiotic.
I feel kind of helpless faced with that situation.

this is a good graphic

@bittersweet Honestly, letting Google track me so they could warn me about health issues and allergies sounds pretty neat.

@nitwhiz We have no privecy :'(

Lol people use Hangouts?

@PaperBag Exactly. Symbiosis. Until it's not. But so far they've always been... But maybe some day not... But... 🤨🙄🤔

Is anyone think about Google keyboard ??😆

Ya, they always keep on tracking users activity.

YouTube: Videos watched, search terms, surveys and ads, location watched from (IP-based and GPS-based in some older app versions as well), video shares, video uploads, subscriptions, your channel's viewer demographics, likes, dislikes, "Not Interested" hits, flags, comments...

OP's list is limited as fuck, and this is just the YouTube list i'm adding to. They even track the precise time till ad skip to determine which ads are more effective and keep you longer.

(List derived from metrics sent by YouTube app, as determined by RE examination.)

Like they say, choose your own poison 😉