Google and Facebook: Why they don’t give a damn about your privacy (09:24)

Google and Facebook: Why they don’t give a damn about your privacy

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Welcome to lesson two, topic three: Google and Facebook, why they don’t give a damn about your privacy. In this lesson we’ll get into some examples where Google and Facebook have been showing that they simply don’t give a damn about your privacy. From tapping open wifi networks to spying on your conversations at home. It’s all been proven. Let’s look into a few examples how Google has been showing not to care about the privacy of their users at all. But first, let’s look at some broken promises by Google in the past:

• The founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, promised they wouldn’t show ads when launching Google in 1998, they broke this promise in 2002
• They also promised they wouldn’t use user profiles while delivering their ads, this promise was broken in 2007
• They would also never connect the data from all the different services like YouTube, Gmail, Calendar. They also broke this promise on januari the 24th in 2012
• And, Google promised to not just connect all the data they gather with Doubleclick. This is an advertising company they bought in 2017. Doubleclick had a completely different approach to selling information to advertisers: they promised the advertisers more then 300 different characteristics from users. Users had to give a specific permission to be able to Google to connect the data. But you can guess what happend, this promise was broken too in june 2016

So Google’s goal here becomes really really obvious. Create or buy beautiful user-friendly and free services like Calendar, Drive, Youtube, Gmail and not to forget: Android. 70% of mobile devices is running on Android right now. The next step is you make sure you seduce as many people as possible to use those services, and to share as much data as possible. Then you connect all the data from different services so that you can sell ads as efficient as possible. Googles revenue of 162 billion dollar in 2019 almost all came from serving ads.

But it doesn’t stop there: Google uses this ad revenue to further enhance their territory by investing in fiber optic cables in areas with a bad internet connection. They invest in self-driving cars, smart-glasses and smart assistants. Their ambitions for data-collection seem to have no boundaries.

In the sources down below you can read about some disturbing privacy invading activities Google has been part of in the past. Listening to Google home users all day, still tracking your Android location while it’s been turned off, letting third parties scan your emails, and, not to forget: installing Covid-19 tracking without user permission. Let’s head on to Facebook.

Because that’s the only other Big Tech company that takes it a step further. To begin with: Facebook know way more about their users then Google does. Just think about all the personal information you had to fill in when creating an account and add all your connected friends, pictures, calendar events, time line messages, private messages. And yes, Facebook also owns Whatsapp.

And they connect all this information to your searching behavior. How do they do this? Every website with a like button gives the user a cookie by which the users online behaviour will be tracked. Given this like button is installed on more than 10 million websites, they are tracking almost everyone online. Think you’re safe when you don’t have Facebook? Think again, the cookie will also be send to people who don’t have a Facebook. So even if you delete Facebook, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. The solution to this problem is laid out in section 3.

And also Facebook has their broken promises. In 2009 they updated their privacy policy to make Facebooks basic user-settings more straightforward. Later on it became obvious that these settings where sharing a lot more data then before. Other broken promises include ‘telling customers to not share their data with advertisers’, it did. Promising to remove all pictures and video’s when removing an account, they didn’t. And promising that some parts of the user information would stay private, while also this wasn’t the case. Marc Zuckerberg had to apologize in front of court because of misleading it’s customers.

So these company’s are obviously trying to fool us into using their products, with continuously making false promises. Facebook and Google are no public services, they are advertising company’s. Your data is their money. See you in the next lesson.

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Google stores all your location data, it’s open for you to see. Check it out here: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb

Google also logs all your search activity data. Check it out here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Since 2012 there has been a big shift in the privacy policy of Google. There’s been a lot of rumour around it at the time, but it has quietly faded to the background again. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-feb-29-la-fi-tn-google-privacy-policy-march-1-20120229-story.html

Other sources

Google’s privacy policy since 2012: a big shift
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-feb-29-la-fi-tn-google-privacy-policy-march-1-20120229-story.html

Where have you been?
Your favourite places are stored in Google’s timeline function. See here: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb

Google Home is listening to you all day
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/07/11/google-home-smart-speakers-employees-listen-conversations/1702205001/

Google still tracks your location if you turned it off
https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-off/
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-sued-over-keeping-location-data-amid-privacy-concerns/

Google stopped scanning e-mails, but still let’s third parties do it
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-will-stop-scanning-content-of-personal-emails
https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/20/technology/google-gmail-scanning/index.html

Google plus scandal
https://www.wired.com/story/google-plus-bug-52-million-users-data-exposed/

An Intentional Mistake: The Anatomy of Google’s Wi-Fi Sniffing Debacle
https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

Google To Get Away With Privacy Scandal – Just a Slap On The Wrist

Google admits it sent private videos in Google Photos to strangers
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122044/google-photos-privacy-breach-takeout-data-video-strangers

Android phones will get the COVID-19 tracking updates via Google Play
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/13/21220033/android-covid-19-tracking-updates-google-play-contact-tracing