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This is nonsensical: > The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about y

This is nonsensical: > The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. This link [Google Takeout] includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google … Well duh, Google stores your gmail emails and Youtube videos and Drive documents and so on! This is the service they're providing you! Google Takeout doesn't give you a 5GB archive of advertising profile or covertly gathered info, it gives you a 5GB archive of the documents you deliberately uploaded to Google services - emails, docs, pics, videos, calendar appointments. The list of Android apps installed on your devices is there so that when you link a new device to your Google account, these apps will be automatically installed on it. And so on. There's a single link on that list related to surveillance - namely, your Google Ads profile, which only shows very basic data, I'm sure they have vastly more complicated data stored on me. There's enough genuine reasons to be upset with Google's surveillance, let's not promote this kind of silliness. Google knows which Google Groups you're subscribed to, really? 5GB could fill 3m Word docs - how many is that in Libraries of Congress?

ballenf 9y ago
Agree mostly, but was surprised that the archive includes long-deleted emails and Drive files. Unless the author was mistake -- haven't tested myself.
- gowld 9y ago
  Considering the author showed fundamental misunderstanding wrong right at the start, why would you assume they got the rest right? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Google has tons of data on you that isn't available in Takeout as well. (So does Facebook.) Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.
- thisisit 9y ago
  > Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen. Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds really incredible.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Straight from the horse's mouth: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-analytics-innovations.html https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... "And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either. According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X). Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue. Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mpc-at-google.html http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp... About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc
efdee 9y ago
The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion? I think that's a point to take home. Users know that Google looks at their "location information". In their minds, it's to provide relevant weather info and whatnot. Seeing it aggregated in this way makes you realise that you actually are sending your entire life to Google servers.
- HenryBemis 9y ago
  Windows 10 do for Microsoft (sucking up and sending to M$ EVERY THING you do) what Android does for Google. Apple is a bit better (less-worse) on this. They do log many things in the background, and hopefully stopped (as they promised) to upload everything on every sync you do.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to trading what's important to what's convenient.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.
    - pksadiq 9y ago
      > People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.
mrtksn 9y ago
This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected. Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" in a story about a paraglider pilot who crash-landed and injured two more people. This is because paragliders don't jump but take off from hills etc. Usually reporting on technical topics is very hard because you need to reach the non-technical audience so you will HAVE TO use illustrative examples and not exactly accurate descriptions so that can be absorbed by the non-technical readers. Unfortunately, this will put you in a position where can be called on by technical readers who are triggered by the "implementation details" of your story. I do believe that calling out the 5GB illustrative example is missing the point of the article. It's just a way to portray size of the data collected on you, it doesn't have any meaning even if this data was 3Mb or 100Gb. For example, if it was 3Mb Google might have used it to convey how little data they collect on you as if the size that this data takes has any correlation about the impact, then why even bother with such an irrelevant point of the "article implementation"?
- Beamer92 9y ago
  Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness? I don't think so, I'd prefer we hold a standard of being correct and put the onus of education on the readers. They can Google what they don't understand. We can educate the public better to not be afraid of technical details. I agree with danarmak, this piece like so many others is just a bunch of sensationalized details. You should know what you're signing up for, nobody should be surprised by anything in there.
  - mrtksn 9y ago
    >Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there. How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise that human race was able to achieve in the last few thousands of years of recorded history? Also, these journalists[not necessarily this one but in general] are usually not experts on the topic that they write on and the better ones usually would consult with someone who is well versed on that topic. There's no way that the expert that the journalist is consulting with, will be able to educate the journalist, so he/she will dumb it down and then the reporter will dumb it down further and re-shape it in a form that the news outlet can sell it to its audience(right wing, left wing, alt-right, communist, highly educated ... whatever, they too are making a product for their customers).
jiveturkey 9y ago
Thanks for the reality check. Poor journalistic integrity.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bhauer 9y ago
I agree with you on the technical merit (or lack thereof) of illustrating the magnitude with colorful metaphors. However, a counter point: I feel it is useful and helpful to our cause to have authors such as this creating those colorful metaphors. We have tried in vain to communicate to laypeople the importance of data safety, self-ownership of data, being mindful of one's privacy, and being suspicious of the data collected by third-parties. I believe laypeople remain disinterested because the way we raise these concerns is abstract. In order to convince laypeople that control of one's data is important, those of us who are matter-of-fact on the matter will convey the facts and try to construct fairly mild-tempered plausible threat scenarios that are, frankly, unconvincing to the majority of people we are trying to convince. For a good chunk of those we're trying to convince, vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat are what is necessary to tip the scale. The recent twitter thread that showed a map of Ireland with every point the user had been in the past several years was a poignant visual representation of our argument. It made the argument way better than repeatedly saying, "Google tracks your location, always!" When we've presented that abstract point previously, we've heard "I don't care, that's fine" as a response every time. And then someone shows them this map and suddenly: "Whoa, that is creepy!" Yes! I for one welcome a bit of colorful language, as long as we don't get totally carried away. I don't really dig the "Well, duh!" attitude if we convey that to the people we're trying to convince. We're trying to make laypeople value their own privacy and feel good doing so. Not judged for having been ignorant of or disinterested in our previous arguments. Be welcoming of this good favor in the fight for data privacy.
- danarmak 9y ago
  The problem isn't how they describe the size of the data. It's that the data whose size they describe is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make. I didn't say "well duh, Google has at least 5GB on you, that's a small number really". I said "well duh, of course Google has your gmails and Drive docs" - and they are as small or large as you make them, their size is completely irrelevant. I did snipe at the comparison to Word docs, not because it's a non-commensurable unit but because Word docs don't have a size - I can easily make a single Word doc 5GB large. But that was an aside quite irrelevant to my main point and maybe I should have omitted it.
some_random 9y ago
Welcome to journalism, by definition journalists aren't experts in what they report. So, sometimes they'll just say stuff that's obviously wrong to anyone with any knowledge of the field they're reporting on. This isn't helped at all by the fact that even the best journalists are forced to put together stories in hours. Even if they research a given topic, they're extremely susceptible to being swayed by biased sources. At best, they won't have time to truly understand what they're reading. Try reading an article in any general-topic news outlet on any topic you are familiar with, or a narrow-topic news outlet for a topic you're an expert on. It will be bad 99% of the time.
kerng 9y ago
You might be a bit too critical with the journalist, the example you provide is the final one after pointing all the not so "obvious to ordinary end user" data Google has about someone. Is it perfect, no. But its good that more mainstream media is discussing these things so people get a better understanding of this. Maybe it will stop folks from uploading unencrypted data to cloud providers down the road and improve research that allows cloud providers to process encrypted data meaningfully without every being able to decrypt. The 3m pages of word doc is odd, but its not uncommon to convert overall size to word doc pages in journalist speech (just map size to average word doc size), and then they disregarding data type. I have seen this in other places too.
agumonkey 9y ago
It's true but long ago I grabbed my takeout archive and was surprised by a few documents about my history of this and that (can't recall, probably gmaps routes I didn't know were stored)

ballenf 9y ago

Agree mostly, but was surprised that the archive includes long-deleted emails and Drive files. Unless the author was mistake -- haven't tested myself.

gowld 9y ago
Considering the author showed fundamental misunderstanding wrong right at the start, why would you assume they got the rest right? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Google has tons of data on you that isn't available in Takeout as well. (So does Facebook.) Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.

thisisit 9y ago
> Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen. Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds really incredible.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Straight from the horse's mouth: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-analytics-innovations.html https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... "And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either. According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X). Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue. Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mpc-at-google.html http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp... About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc

efdee 9y ago

The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion? I think that's a point to take home. Users know that Google looks at their "location information". In their minds, it's to provide relevant weather info and whatnot. Seeing it aggregated in this way makes you realise that you actually are sending your entire life to Google servers.

HenryBemis 9y ago
Windows 10 do for Microsoft (sucking up and sending to M$ EVERY THING you do) what Android does for Google. Apple is a bit better (less-worse) on this. They do log many things in the background, and hopefully stopped (as they promised) to upload everything on every sync you do.
sametmax 9y ago
Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to trading what's important to what's convenient.
- kodablah 9y ago
  I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.
  - pksadiq 9y ago
    > People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.

mrtksn 9y ago

This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected. Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" in a story about a paraglider pilot who crash-landed and injured two more people. This is because paragliders don't jump but take off from hills etc. Usually reporting on technical topics is very hard because you need to reach the non-technical audience so you will HAVE TO use illustrative examples and not exactly accurate descriptions so that can be absorbed by the non-technical readers. Unfortunately, this will put you in a position where can be called on by technical readers who are triggered by the "implementation details" of your story. I do believe that calling out the 5GB illustrative example is missing the point of the article. It's just a way to portray size of the data collected on you, it doesn't have any meaning even if this data was 3Mb or 100Gb. For example, if it was 3Mb Google might have used it to convey how little data they collect on you as if the size that this data takes has any correlation about the impact, then why even bother with such an irrelevant point of the "article implementation"?

Beamer92 9y ago
Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness? I don't think so, I'd prefer we hold a standard of being correct and put the onus of education on the readers. They can Google what they don't understand. We can educate the public better to not be afraid of technical details. I agree with danarmak, this piece like so many others is just a bunch of sensationalized details. You should know what you're signing up for, nobody should be surprised by anything in there.
- mrtksn 9y ago
  >Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there. How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise that human race was able to achieve in the last few thousands of years of recorded history? Also, these journalists[not necessarily this one but in general] are usually not experts on the topic that they write on and the better ones usually would consult with someone who is well versed on that topic. There's no way that the expert that the journalist is consulting with, will be able to educate the journalist, so he/she will dumb it down and then the reporter will dumb it down further and re-shape it in a form that the news outlet can sell it to its audience(right wing, left wing, alt-right, communist, highly educated ... whatever, they too are making a product for their customers).

jiveturkey 9y ago

Thanks for the reality check. Poor journalistic integrity.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bhauer 9y ago

I agree with you on the technical merit (or lack thereof) of illustrating the magnitude with colorful metaphors. However, a counter point: I feel it is useful and helpful to our cause to have authors such as this creating those colorful metaphors. We have tried in vain to communicate to laypeople the importance of data safety, self-ownership of data, being mindful of one's privacy, and being suspicious of the data collected by third-parties. I believe laypeople remain disinterested because the way we raise these concerns is abstract. In order to convince laypeople that control of one's data is important, those of us who are matter-of-fact on the matter will convey the facts and try to construct fairly mild-tempered plausible threat scenarios that are, frankly, unconvincing to the majority of people we are trying to convince. For a good chunk of those we're trying to convince, vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat are what is necessary to tip the scale. The recent twitter thread that showed a map of Ireland with every point the user had been in the past several years was a poignant visual representation of our argument. It made the argument way better than repeatedly saying, "Google tracks your location, always!" When we've presented that abstract point previously, we've heard "I don't care, that's fine" as a response every time. And then someone shows them this map and suddenly: "Whoa, that is creepy!" Yes! I for one welcome a bit of colorful language, as long as we don't get totally carried away. I don't really dig the "Well, duh!" attitude if we convey that to the people we're trying to convince. We're trying to make laypeople value their own privacy and feel good doing so. Not judged for having been ignorant of or disinterested in our previous arguments. Be welcoming of this good favor in the fight for data privacy.

danarmak 9y ago
The problem isn't how they describe the size of the data. It's that the data whose size they describe is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make. I didn't say "well duh, Google has at least 5GB on you, that's a small number really". I said "well duh, of course Google has your gmails and Drive docs" - and they are as small or large as you make them, their size is completely irrelevant. I did snipe at the comparison to Word docs, not because it's a non-commensurable unit but because Word docs don't have a size - I can easily make a single Word doc 5GB large. But that was an aside quite irrelevant to my main point and maybe I should have omitted it.

some_random 9y ago

Welcome to journalism, by definition journalists aren't experts in what they report. So, sometimes they'll just say stuff that's obviously wrong to anyone with any knowledge of the field they're reporting on. This isn't helped at all by the fact that even the best journalists are forced to put together stories in hours. Even if they research a given topic, they're extremely susceptible to being swayed by biased sources. At best, they won't have time to truly understand what they're reading. Try reading an article in any general-topic news outlet on any topic you are familiar with, or a narrow-topic news outlet for a topic you're an expert on. It will be bad 99% of the time.

kerng 9y ago

You might be a bit too critical with the journalist, the example you provide is the final one after pointing all the not so "obvious to ordinary end user" data Google has about someone. Is it perfect, no. But its good that more mainstream media is discussing these things so people get a better understanding of this. Maybe it will stop folks from uploading unencrypted data to cloud providers down the road and improve research that allows cloud providers to process encrypted data meaningfully without every being able to decrypt. The 3m pages of word doc is odd, but its not uncommon to convert overall size to word doc pages in journalist speech (just map size to average word doc size), and then they disregarding data type. I have seen this in other places too.

agumonkey 9y ago

It's true but long ago I grabbed my takeout archive and was surprised by a few documents about my history of this and that (can't recall, probably gmaps routes I didn't know were stored)