Facebook and Google Keep More Info on You Than You Thought

Want to freak yourself out? I’m gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Dylan Curran, technical consultant and web developer, recently shared the ways that companies like Facebook and Google keep information about you. For instance, Google keeps a log of your movements if you have location turned on.

2. This is every place I have been in the last twelve months in Ireland, going in so far as the time of day I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one pic.twitter.com/I1kB1vwntT

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

What about those searches that you thought you deleted from your devices? They’re not gone!

3. https://t.co/qFCgY6QLN5 Google stores search history across all your devices on a separate database, so even if you delete your search history and phone history, Google STILL stores everything until you go in and delete everything, and you have to do this on all devices

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Dylan show how Google has an advertising profile for you based on what they know about you. Google will also keep a log of every ap and extension you use and how you use them.
Google keeps all your Youtube history.
Facebook keeps “every message you’ve ever sent or been sent, every file you’ve ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you’ve ever sent or been sent”. It also have a list of words associated with you, what they think you find interesting.

13. Somewhat pointlessly, they also store all the stickers you’ve ever sent on Facebook (I have no idea why they do this, it’s just a joke at this stage) pic.twitter.com/4F5sExbynf

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Companies like Facebook and Google might keep these records to ensure consistency across devices, sure, but remember that Facebook and Google are giant advertising companies. They gather information on you so they can sell very targeted ads.

19. This is one of the craziest things about the modern age, we would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us, but we just went ahead and did it ourselves because fuck it I want to watch cute dog videos

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Are you OK with that? Are they just selling ads? In light of the Cambridge Analytica ‘data breach‘, I wouldn’t trust that nothing nefarious will happen with our stored data.

You can read the whole thread, unrolled, HERE. I’ve had to read it a few times over. You may want to follow some of the links to erase data and change you privacy settings.

16. Side-note, if you have Windows 10 installed, this is a picture of JUST the privacy options with 16 different sub-menus, which have all of the options enabled by default when you install Windows 10 pic.twitter.com/oHyfYndTnJ

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018