Google aims to collect small pieces of information that, on their own, do not provide much and aggregating them make sense and create not only a profile but also understand your evolution.
So the more small pieces they have, the more they have an understanding. Every service of Google is aimed at collecting those pieces. Let’s see some example with a story.
- You are on Gmail - Google read your email, knows your contacts, who do you ignore, who do you reply fast, which email you open and which link you click.
- by clicking a link you go to a website, probably managed by Google Analytics, that will then follow every click, page, ad, etc. you do.
- if you use Google Chrome, Google gets access to cookies of other companies, all your history and a good deal of data on your behaviour on websites not managed by Analytics
- and by doing this all on a Google Android mobile, Google also gets your position, number of steps, probably the billboard you have around
Scary, so I am actively removing any piece of information I provide them (and others) and it is not easy and it is costly.
Current initiative to remove some Google spying:
- Not using Gmail: https://frankcontrepois.com/post/20191217-tech-protonmail/
- Not using Analytics: https://frankcontrepois.com/post/20200127-tech-no-stats/
- Using Firefox as my default browser
- Using DuckDuckGo and Firefox as search engine and browswer on my mobile