As of June 2017, 51% of the world’s population had internet access. In 2015, the International Telecommunication Union estimated about 3.2 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population, would be online by the end of 2017.
I recently requested a download from Google of all the personal data that they have from my activity on their various products and received a link to download my ‘archive’ – a staggering 18 links to files of 2 Gigabyutes each for a total of 42.61 Gigabytes of date that Google have stored charting my activities across 34 of their products online.
The first download is going to take around 3 hours so that means I will be spending a minimum of 54 hours downloading the data that Google have stored on my personal activities online.
Put the data in another way – I signed up for Gmail 14 years ago in 2004 – since then Google have collected and stored an average of 3 Gigabytes of data per year on my online activities!
WTF!
In February 2016 during an earnings call, Google announced that Gmail had more than 1 billion monthly active users. Up from the 900 million that the company had announced during its I/O developer conference in May 2015 and up from 425 million in 2012. So, we can safely estimate the present Google account numbers at 1.4 Billion in 2018.
If we ESTIMATE that each person using Google has around 18 Gigabytes of personal data stored by Google on their servers across the world then the amount of storage space required is simply staggering.
Google would then hold 25.5 Billion Gigabytes of personal information on all of it’s account holders.
The BIG question is why would someone spend so much money on harvesting and storing that information? Are they selling that data? Using it to hold countries or individuals to ransom? Does the profiling of each individual user really pay off in terms of tailored adverts? Is money the only reason?
Go on, I dare you, request a download of all the personal data that Google stores about your activity online by clicking this link: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout and then, after receiving the download link via e-mail, come back and tell us how big that file is.
The message I received about my data download read like this:
If you have decided to take your data elsewhere, please research the data export policies of your destination. Otherwise, if you ever want to leave the service, you may have to leave important stuff like your photos behind.
Do not download your archives on public computers or upload them where others can see them.
Once you download your data, if you’d like to explore other options to manage your account, including account deletion, please visit myaccount.google.com.
The following Google products have stored my personal data – what is even more staggering is that I did not even know that I was using some of them!
+1s, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome, Classroom, Contacts vCard format, Drive Microsoft Powerpoint and 3 other formats, Fit, Google My Business, Google Pay Send, Google Pay: rewards, gift cards, & offers, Google Photos, Google Play Books HTML format, Google Play Music, Google+ CirclesvCard format, Google+ PagesHTML format, Google+ StreamHTML format, Groups, GSuite Marketplace, Handsfree, Hangouts, Hangouts on Air, Keep, Location History JSON format, Mail, Maps (your places), Moderator, My Activity, My Maps, Profile, Search Contributions, Tasks, YouTubeOPML (RSS) format.
A hat tip to Dylan Curran who is researching the data that companies like Google, Facebook etc have harvested from our activities and in the process, I am sure, are succeeding in trampling on everyone’s rights to privacy.
As Curran says;”This information has millions of nefarious uses and violates multiple human rights. You’re not a terrorist? Then how come you were googling ISIS? Work at Google and you’re suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last ten years”
See more here:
32. This information has millions of nefarious uses and violates multiple human rights, you're not a terrorist? Then how come you were googling ISIS? Work at Google and you're suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last ten years
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
Alan Straton
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