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Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

theguardian.com

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Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#131

Post by kerng »

danarmak wrote: post #24

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 t…

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.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#132

Post by agumonkey »

danarmak wrote: post #24

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 t…

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)

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#133

Post by mrtksn »

honr wrote: post #118
mrtksn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" i…

Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory. And with that, I'd consider this example a form of failed journalism. Regardless of whether or not there is actually an underlying point, this particular piece of pseudo-journalism didn't capture it. I chuckled when I read the author's description of himself/herself: "... who does extensive research into spreading technical awareness ...". One might…

> Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory

I don't think that this is the case here. To be an "end justifies means" the writer would have to give a false information on an information that is relevant to the core of the story. Does it really matter what's the size of some digital data? Would it be O.K. if Google collected 100Mb of data but totally unacceptable if that was 5Gb?

The size of the data is an irrelevant implementation detail of the story. Even assuming that this is all the data about you is silly in the first place but the articla is not about that - even if the title says so.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#134

Post by agumonkey »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40
danarmak wrote: post #24

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 t…

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.

I wonder if they store more than that, heatmaps, and such

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#135

Post by alach11 »

gcb0 wrote: post #110
WA wrote: post #99

NO, NO, NO. This is not all data Facebook/Google has on me . It's way less. What I don't get in all of this debate: People grant FB/Google/any other app access to their data and seriously expect that their data isn't harvested? IMHO, there really is zero surprise that Facebook has your call and SMS history, if you granted access to that. Or every single login timestamp. What is way scarier is that the dump you can do…

people don't know they are granting permissions. when you provision a new android device it will try to link your account to chrone, and its very hard even for a developer to catch its chrome and not android os. after that small mistake (which is an optout in the ui pattern) its game over. google have all your history and every webview ad has your full profile. not to mention your web bank passwords are now convenien…

"passwords are now conveniently save in google servers in plain text"

Do you have a citation for this?

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#136

Post by basscomm »

deadbunny wrote: post #87
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very much this. I downloaded my data from Facebook last week, and as you say, it's just stuff I have shared and not any of the tracking/profile stuff. Can't say I was surprised at all.

Right before deleting my account, I also downloaded my data. The most illuminating thing I discovered that there were several advertisers that 'had my contact info' that I had never dealt with in any way (as far as I know), including lots of political groups from all over the country, even though I made a point to never engage in or post anything even remotely political when I had an active account.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#137

Post by Bartweiss »

bhauer wrote: post #115
danarmak wrote: post #24

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 t…

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 co…

> vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat

In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all.

The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew.

But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you.

Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#138

Post by faitswulff »

mrtksn wrote: post #98
danarmak wrote: post #24

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 t…

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" i…

The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets and those who have experienced traumatic events in their past that would cause severe distress, not as a synonym for "annoyed."

A veteran who relives the horrors of war when fireworks go off is not nearly in the same space as a developer who is annoyed that someone misused technical jargon.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#139

Post by sametmax »

kodablah wrote: post #109
sametmax wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.

If people are in a burning building and half of them keep putting the content of the bar into the flames saying it pretty and fire can't harm us anyway, it's a problem.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#140

Post by wu-ikkyu »

UncleMeat wrote: post #129
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Google has never been hacked or compromised by an insider?

Do you think that major companies don't have systems to mitigate this threat?

None that are invulernable to an APT or an inside attack.

Saying "I trust company X with my data" is the same as saying "I trust that company X cannot be hacked".

"There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked."

-John Chambers

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