I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me: 4 Ways Google is Stalking You
If you’ve ever been surfing online and noticed a banner ad on a website that seems to have read your mind, that’s because Google practically is. With every algorithm change, Google becomes smarter and more adept at learning about user interests, activity, history, etc. Call it creepy, call it artificial intelligence—call it whatever you want—here’s how Google is keeping tabs on you:
Gmail
Google sorts out your inbox based on primary (regular correspondence), social (notifications from interactions on your social accounts) and promotions (deals and offers from stores that you’ve subscribed to) along with other tabs based on your needs. Google uses your interactions and contacts to detect spam and be able to sort out what you’re likely to respond to, what’s important to you, and what can be stored as spam or stored in a different category.
Google Maps
If you use Google Maps, you can see every place that you’ve been to over a calendar timeline. Google stores your location search queries, which you can view under the “show” tab and view location data over a month. The good news—you can opt out of this or quickly delete all of your location history if this seems to be too much of a safety concern for you.
Google+
For those using Google+, you’ve probably noticed if you’ve searched your name in the search engine that some of your comments or posts show up in results. Even though Google authorship was removed, and Google+ posts don’t show up as prominently in results as they once did, you may find still find some of your old content in the results if it’s relevant. Google favors its own product, Google+, over other social media networks in the results.
Advertisements
Here comes the part that’s likely to make you wonder how much Google knows about you—the advertisements. The banner ads that you see on websites are based on Google acquiring years of information on you—what you search for the most, what websites you tend to visit the most, anything that you’ve left on the internet trail. This information is useful to marketers because it allows them to target the audience most likely to click on the advertisement. Hotel marketers in particular can create remarketing ads based on a user’s behavior, says Lani Gregory, who works in hotel web design. “Hotel marketers can create remarketing ads that track what parts of the website users visited and if they ended up booking a room,” explains Lani. “Let’s say a visitor did not end up making a hotel booking—if that visitor searched other websites, then they will start seeing the hotel’s remarketing ads appear with the hope that the user will click and make the final booking.”
You can erase your history and determine how Google targets ads for you, but this won’t stop ads from showing up. As Leah Rise, the Director of Search and Social for an seo company puts it, “As digital marketers, we find that Google’s determination to personalize search results can be detrimental to a website trying to break though. As consumers, we can move from our mobile phone, to tablet and desktop with ease and our previous search results follow us. But the question becomes, who’s really benefiting the most? Google or consumer?”
The minute you submit your name, address and other personal information to create a Google account, the door opens for Google to use that information to control what you see. The more Google services you use, the more mindful you need to be of security settings and what information you allow them to have access to. The good news is that Google takes security very seriously—you just can’t help but feel like there’s someone behind the screen, showing you exactly what you want to see at all times.