Did you know that unlike searching on DuckDuckGo, when you search on Google, they keep your search history forever? That means they know every search you’ve ever done on Google. That alone is pretty scary, but it’s just the shallow end of the very deep pool of data that they try to collect on people.

What most people don’t realize is that even if you don’t use any Google products directly, they’re still trying to track as much as they can about you. Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they’re also trying to track most everywhere you go on the internet, trying to slurp up your browsing history!

Most people also don’t know that Google runs most of the ads you see across the internet and in apps – you know those ones that follow you around everywhere? Yup, that’s Google, too. They aren’t really a search company anymore – they’re a tracking company. They are tracking as much as they can for these annoying and intrusive ads, including recording every time you see them, where you saw them, if you clicked on them, etc.

But even that’s not all…

If You Use Google Products

If you do use Google products, they try to track even more. In addition to tracking everything you’ve ever searched for on Google (e.g. “weird rash”), Google also tracks every video you’ve ever watched on YouTube. Many people actually don’t know that Google owns YouTube; now you know.

And if you use Android (yeah, Google owns that too), then Google is also usually tracking:

• Every place you’ve been via Google Location Services.
• How often you use your apps, when you use them, where you use them, and whom you use them to interact with. (This is just excessive by any measure.)
• All of your text messages, which unlike on iOS, are not encrypted by default.
• Your photos (even in some cases the ones you’ve deleted).

If you use Gmail, they of course also have all your e-mail messages. If you use Google Calendar, they know all your schedule. There’s a pattern here: For all Google products (Hangouts, Music, Drive, etc.), you can expect the same level of tracking: that is, pretty much anything they can track, they will.

Oh, and if you use Google Home, they also store a live recording of every command you’ve (or anyone else) has ever said to your device! Yes, you heard that right (err… they heard it) – you can check out all the recordings on your Google activity page.

Essentially, if you allow them to, they’ll track pretty close to, well, everything you do on the Internet. In fact, even if you tell them to stop tracking you, Google has been known to not really listen, for example with location history.

You Become the Product

Why does Google want all of your information anyway? Simple: as stated, Google isn’t a search company anymore, they’re a tracking company. All of these data points allow Google to build a pretty robust profile about you. In some ways, by keeping such close tabs on everything you do, they, at least in some ways, may know you better than you know yourself.

And Google uses your personal profile to sell ads, not only on their search engine, but also on over three million other websites and apps. Every time you visit one of these sites or apps, Google is following you around with hyper-targeted ads.

It’s exploitative. By allowing Google to collect all this info, you are allowing hundreds of thousands of advertisers to bid on serving you ads based on your sensitive personal data. Everyone involved is profiting from your information, except you. You are the product.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is entirely possible for a web-based business to be profitable without making you the product – since 2014, DuckDuckGo has been profitable without storing or sharing any personal information on people at all. You can read more about our business model here.

The Myth of “Nothing to Hide”

Some may argue that they have “nothing to hide,” so they are not concerned with the amount of information Google has collected and stored on them, but that argument is fundamentally flawed for many reasons.

Everyone has information they want to keep private: Do you close the door when you go to the bathroom? Privacy is about control over your personal information. You don’t want it in the hands of everyone, and certainly don’t want people profiting on it without your consent or participation.

In addition, privacy is essential to democratic institutions like voting and everyday situations such as getting medical care and performing financial transactions. Without it, there can be significant harms.

On an individual level, lack of privacy leads to putting you into a filter bubble, getting manipulated by ads, discrimination, fraud, and identity theft. On a societal level, it can lead to deepened polarization and societal manipulation like we’ve unfortunately been seeing multiply in recent years.

You Can Live Google Free

Basically, Google tries to track too much. It’s creepy and simply just more information than one company should have on anyone.

Thankfully, there are many good ways to reduce your Google footprint, even close to zero! If you are ready to live without Google, we have recommendations for services to replace their suite of products, as well as instructions for clearing your Google search history. It might feel like you are trapped in the Google-verse, but it is possible to break free.

For starters, just switching the search engine for all your searches goes a long way. After all, you share your most intimate questions with your search engine; at the very least, shouldn’t those be kept private? If you switch to the DuckDuckGo app and extension you will not only make your searches anonymous, but also block Google’s most widespread and invasive trackers as you navigate the web.

If you’re unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, we are an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. We operate a search engine alternative to Google at http://duckduckgo.com, and offer a mobile app and desktop browser extension to protect you from Google, Facebook and other trackers, no matter where you go on the Internet.

We’re also trying to educate users through our blog, social media, and a privacy “crash course” newsletter.

Photo by stockcatalog , www.thoughtcatalog.com

The post What does Google know about me? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I was recently alerted to a documentary on Dutch TV highlighting malpractice among locksmiths in the Netherlands. The focus of the program was on the exorbitant prices locksmiths charge for door opening and lock replacement. The problem was traced to competition between companies that use Google ad-words to reach customers. Many of these companies do nothing more than broker contact between a customer and a handyman who may or may not have professional accreditation and the skills to open a lock. In many instances, such ‘independent workers’ are not registered with the Chamber of Commerce or paying tax. Neither do they provide warrantees on their services and products. The brokers may charge up to 70% for the mere act of running a website and employing someone to answer the telephone.

Once we just had the Yellow pages as a middleman, and they caught on quickly to the fact that some sectors are totally dependent on advertising to get customers and were quick to exploit this. One way they went about it is by getting companies offering the same sort of services or products to compete with each other for a prominent place on a page. So, for instance, a butcher might pay a few hundred Euro per year for an A5 size ad, but a locksmith could expect to pay 10.000 Euro for the same space. I know for a fact that representatives would visit competing companies on the same day to prevent them from contacting each other and finding out what each was paying for their ads. Clever, but not clever enough, because I wrote to as many of my competitors as possible and offered to work together, to form a cartel, to prevent the Yellow pages from setting us up by getting us to bid against each other and this actually worked. I had less success though, when I realized how things were developing with Google ad-words.

The days of the Yellow pages are now long gone, but a similar situation now exists with respect to the top search results on Google search engine, with the first 2-4 search results dominated by Google’s own advertisements, Google-ads. The problem with this, in case you can’t already smell it, is that Google now not only controls a good 90% of the market for search results, it also makes money by promoting its own search results. The only thing that prevents them from asking money to show ‘organic’ search results, these are the results of an open search using a key word, is their pretense of providing a ‘neutral’ search engine, or providing ‘relevant’ search results based on their algorithms which attempt to probe which search results you ‘really need.’

The problem with this situation is that it literally casts Google as an employer. First of all, Google charges somewhere around 38 to 50 Euro per click for locksmiths, generating huge income and a powerful incentive to grab more of the market. These expenses are of course transferred to the customer, for instance, when a company sends out a locksmith to your house, somewhere between 30-40% of the fee may go directly to Google. Add to this the fact that Google pays virtually no tax in any country on earth and what we have here is a recipe for totalitarian control of employment. Indeed, Google is currently already the world’s biggest employer.

How did this situation arise and why have governments failed to regulate or limit Google’s control?

From the point of view of the early adopter, Google’s ad-words product offered the advantage of being able to pay one’s way to the top of the search results, however at the time, around the year 2000, Google ads were displayed fairly discretely in the sidebar on the right, and all other organic search results were displayed in the main content section.

For a mere 0.01 cent per click, you could start advertising. You filled out a form, saying how much you were prepared to pay for a click on a specific key-word or search term, and whenever someone typed that key word into a browser, Google would display your ad, discretely in the sidebar. But there was a catch: for a mere 0.01 cents, your competitors could outbid you and then their ad would be displayed above yours. This inevitably led to companies attempting to outbid each other and the prices rose, within a year, to 1-2 euros and we have now reached 25-40 Euro, depending on the time of day, the key word, the number of competitors and the number of displays etc.

I predicted this system would rapidly force up the prices and contacted my competitors to get them to agree to boycott it, and to rely on organic search results instead. The results were predictable: big companies with lots of employees were seeking to consolidate their place in the new marketplace and they didn’t give a hoot, because they thought they were outbidding their competitors. Of course, what they didn’t really think about was what the future would look like when 40-50% of their hard earned cash would be going straight to Google.

I have been contemplating how to beat this system for a long time. I have managed to keep my company afloat, and even to stay in the top percentage of organic search results with a very simple website and good SEO. But the problem is becoming too complex to handle:

Google’s algorithms are becoming ever more complex and unfathomable. Search results now show companies and businesses closest to you, which means that competition has focused on setting up hundreds of fake websites for every district, and soon probably every street in my hometown. Google keeps producing new products and they are getting so technically complex that specialists have to be called in to work on SEO (search engine optimalization), on Google+ Google Maps and Google Locations. Companies try to keep up with these changes and lose track of where their businesses are registered, their passwords etc. It’s total mayhem. But there is another problem:

Screen real estate on the new generation of mobile devices is extremely valuable. Google is only one search engine, but it is the most widely used so lets take it as an example: if you type in locksmith and the name of your city, the first 3-4 results at the top of your screen are commercial Google Ads. If there is any screen space left, that is what is reserved for ‘organic’ search results. These are the raw data of websites offering locksmith services, but these include the search results for companies already advertising commercially with Ad-words. In effect, clients are not being offered a ‘neutral’ view of what is available on the web, but a very small section of all legitimate businesses, many of whom are dependent on Google. If you want to get away from those results, you need to click through several pages, but who in their right mind is going to do that in an emergency? When you are locked out in the middle of the night and its raining, you are going to go for the first results you get. And so, Google owns and controls that market.

In an effort to beat the system, I have gone back to real-world advertising, using stickers to market out services and updating the design of my website to convey the fact that we are not only reliable, but also local, friendly and small-scale. Of course its only a matter of time before Google starts competing for public spaces, to put up its own branded screens displaying ‘useful information.’ Indeed, with the introduction of Chrome and Google glasses, Google will be able to project its ads directly into your head.

Its time for public (not necessarily government) regulation of the Internet. The problem is of course that government institutions are notoriously inept at understanding the Internet, let alone regulating it in ways that would are effective, that achieve what they set out to do without being overly inclusive or imprecise. More problematic is the fact that our present masters are also deeply in the pocket of companies like Google, not prepared to regulate them, to make them pay taxes or publicly accountable because that conflicts with the free market ideology according to which total lack of government oversight or control equates with a “level playing field.”

In the meantime I cannot think of any better way to beat the Google’s of this world than to advise everyone to shop local, to barter, and to make sure the names of real world businesses are remembered, shared and praised. Don’t click on Google ads, don’t even look at them! And for God’s sake, start using other search engines!

What could we do about this situation collectively?

After putting some more thought into the matter, I realize that questions are being raised by many different groups about Google’s backroom deal with the Tax Departments of various European States and the European Parliament. Google is not alone in raking in huge amounts of cash while paying next to nothing in taxes. To offer just a small example, in the Netherlands consumers pay up to 21% VAT. At the very least we would expect financial institutions to contribute that amount in taxes, Value Added Tax is supposed to go to the tax department, but these companies are registered offshore, in places like the Cayman Islands where they pay no taxes at all. Here is a brief list of financial institutions I use to run my company as well as for personal ends:

• Google (Ad-words)
• Payleven (Creditcard payments)
• iZettle (Creditcard payments)
• Mastercard
• Maestro
• American Express
• Paypal
• Digitalefactuur (Online Invoicing)
• ING | RABO | AMRO | HSBC (I don’t bank with these institutions, but my customers use them to make payments to me, and every transaction makes them a profit that either comes out of my pocket, or out of that of my customers, before getting reinvested in Nuclear Power, Arctic drilling, Monsanto, or … the Arms industry … think about it).

All of the above companies route their transactions through offshore banks and none of them contribute much to the local economies in which they are increasingly exercising power of control.

This situation is increasingly ludicrous and dangerous. Money is withdrawn from local economies and ends up in the hands of big corporations. As a consequence, governments are finding it harder to finance public spending on infrastructure, education, transport, media, communications, health care, pensions, and so the balance tips evermore in the direction of privatization of institutions and resources that should morally and practically belong to everybody collectively.

We need to see more class action and litigation by private individuals and small and mid-scale businesses to force tax authorities to open up the accounts of these big companies to public inspection and force them to pay taxes or lose access to markets. This is of course exactly what the TTIP aims to prevent, effectively depriving governments and civilians of the ability to challenge such financial profiteering through courts and legislative bodies.”

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