by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
IF YOU LIVE and work online, you’re creating electronic selfies all the time. It’s worth you time to see what those selfies show about you.
Google forms a profile about you in order to show you relevant advertising. I look at what Google thinks I like by viewing https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
For the record, Google thinks I’m interested in multimedia software, training and certification, and business management software. Ten years ago, Google was serving me advertisements about bicycles, Entertainment News, dance & electronic music (because I bought those kinds of tracks from Google), finance, fitness (I was teaching fitness students), food & drink, hair care, hygiene & toiletries, make-Up & cosmetics, mobile phones online video pop music, rap & hip-hop and shooter games.
I stopped carrying my Android phone three months ago, so Google’s location history function depends upon my Chrome browser settings. Google has constructed a rather accurate map of my actual location based on what I see at https://maps.google.com/locationhistory
Google has saved more than 100,000 search queries I have made. I use the tracking at https://history.google.com as part of the fact-checking process needed to keep academic content fresh and relevant. I check text queries and YouTube queries. https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history
I am thinking about downloading everything Google has recorded by using Google Takeout https://www.google.com/takeout and then asking an AI to summarise my interests based on my queries, browsing history, and travel. I know I will need to clean up the data because most of the files are more than 25 MB in size and that’s the upload limit imposed by most of the AI services.
Whenever I travel, I check Google to see if anyone might have accessed my Google account. I’ve seen IP addresses and city locations appear in Google Security settings that have caused me to change account passwords. You can see more here:
https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity
When you burrow into the security activity, you can also see the exact type of permissions granted to various apps. I routinely revoke access to apps that I no longer use. I need to share these observations with the youngest students in my classrooms because they’re new to the concept of surveillance capitalism.