Paranoia

March 2022

As the saying goes, just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t watching you.  And if you go online, they certainly are watching.

The problem is that it’s hard to be anonymous online, and anyway if we were it would remove much of what the internet is useful for; you cannot anonymously buy broad bean plants online.  So, we happily admit who we are and dish out information about ourselves.  That has allowed Google, Facebook and others to reap a lot of hay.

As we know, Google is free because we the product, not the client; our details are used to sell targeted advertising.  But how much can it really know about us?  It’s a surprising amount, and what they don’t know they often guess, eerily well.

In the first place, your computer is a blabbermouth.  It has a unique identification number which it passes to websites, along with information about your ISP, browser, Operating System and more.  It tells a website all this before you’ve done anything.  The website can now identify you, see and remember what pages you look at, and spot you if you come back.

It can start building up a profile of you from all this.  Then, once you’ve placed an order for broad bean plants, if not before, it has enough data to sell to one of the big advertising platforms.  That platform then places relevant adverts on the website you are looking at, which is when you start seeing the same adverts on different websites; they know that it’s you watching, or at least it’s someone using your computer.

This sort of thing moves into overdrive with search engines, because they have a much broader picture of you.

To find out what Google knows about you, go to myaccount.google.com and look around.  From the menu, find ‘Data and Privacy’ then ‘History Settings’ then ‘Web & App Activity.’  There you can see exactly what you’ve been up to on their numerous services – searching, maps, websites visited, YouTube videos watched (Google owns YouTube) and so on. 

Then go to adssettings.google.com.  This shows what Google knows, or has guessed, about you and then uses to pick the adverts to show you.  Click on each section; it will explain itself and give you a chance to turn it off.

Now, before you mutter and grumble about privacy and intrusion, please remember that it was you who told Google all this stuff, even if you didn’t know you were doing it; Google didn’t set out to spy on you; it just recorded what you did.

To be fair to Google it makes no secret of any of this and offers you the chance to delete records and tame what it collects in future, although Google’s caveat will always be that if you do exclude yourself, you are hampering its ability to provide you with a smooth and helpful service.  Maybe. 

Companies have always collected information on how we interact with them; it would be odd if they didn’t.  In fact, I think we’d be irritated if a company didn’t keep a record of our dealings with them. 

However, it is the scale of what is collected these days that takes some getting used to.  Every step we take on the internet is recorded somewhere, often in more than one place.  You even do it yourself, because Windows keeps a record of actions on your computer.

Half of me worries that it’s too much, but the the other half wonders if it really matters.  I’m not doing anything nefarious and if it helps Google find the information I want without charge, perhaps it’s a fair price to pay.

So, I’ll relax and go back to planting the broad beans.