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The original was posted on /r/privacy by /u/aka-18 on 2023-09-01 22:05:28+00:00.

This is copy-pasted from SimplifiedPrivacy [dot] com, check out the full article with the sources and pictures there. Google is the opposite of privacy. They maliciously collect data from you in the following ways:

  1. Saving all your Google searches, tied to your identity across devices [1] [2] [30]

  2. Reading all your emails. Even if you don’t use Gmail directly, but you’re sending email to someone who does. [5] [6]

  3. Saving all your web traffic if the website uses Google Ads, Captchas, or Analytics (and over 85% of all websites use some of their services). Even if you aren’t signed in to a Google account, and you’re using a proxy, they can still use past cookies and browser fingerprinting to identify you. [35] [1] [25] [26]

Google’s reCaptcha fingerprinting includes mouse movements, response time, timezone, screen dimensions, IP address, and any cookies. ReCAPTCHA uses the google [dot] com domain instead of one specific to ReCAPTCHA, which allows Google to receive any cookies you have directly, instead of the website you’re visiting. [35] This concentrates the vast majority of all traffic data in the hands of a single company, which can then be used to de-anonymize users.

  1. Everything you do in Google’s Chrome Browser is recorded, including even how long you are idle on a page. [7] [8]

  2. Tracking and Saving your physical location, via Android’s GPS and Wifi triangulation. [12] [13]

Even if you turn location features off or set the phone to airplane mode, it still saves your location via Wifi triangulation, which is the process of pinging nearby Wifi hotspots to identify where you are. [9] [10] [11] Wifi triangulation can figure out your real location, even if you have a fake IP address from a proxy. [14]

As intelligence expert and ex-law enforcement Michael Bazzell says, Google is one of the first places law enforcement goes to for information because Androids track everyone’s location so accurately. Bazzell points out that even if you’re not directly involved in something, just owning an Android that was near it, can get you involved in answering police questions. Bazzell’s experience serving in law enforcement and intelligence motivated him to completely cut Google out of his life even though he’s doing “nothing wrong”. [11]

  1. Keeping track of who you know to identify new phones or email accounts as you.

Rob Braxman

Privacy expert and phone operating system designer Rob Braxman points out that, by synching everyone’s phones’ contact lists and who they are physically standing near, Google (and therefore governments) can identify unknown devices or email accounts as you. [30] [31] [32a] Braxman further points to publicly available websites made by Google’s Jigsaw division and their partner Moonshot CVE, which openly sells services to governments to track and manipulate search results for targeted users. These users targeted by Jigsaw & Moonshot CVE’s government clients have their search history, location, and identifying fingerprint stored in a database. [32b]

  1. Recording and saving audio of your private conversations [16] [17] [18]

Google’s Android has the microphone constantly recording and saving your intimate personal conversations against your wishes for their profit and power. As an extensive academic study of tech patents by Consumer Watch Dog points out, Google will claim this is only to find out if you said the words “Google Assistant,” but yet they have publicly filed patents to scan audio conversations and any available visuals on a variety of home smart devices to identify who is speaking, what you’re interested in, and what you’re doing for the purpose of targeted advertising. [15]

Tracking what you say, what you like, when you sleep, and even when you go the bathroom, goes well beyond Google Assistant helping you do a quick search and would instead be considered an all-inclusive surveillance. [15]

In addition, they’ll allow 3rd party apps to record you without your knowledge because of poor permissions control. As University of California Santa Barbara cybersecurity researchers presented at a BlackHat European conference, 3rd party apps like Silverpush can play high frequency audio, which is invisible to the human ear, on another device like a television ad or mall kiosk. Then your phone’s mic picks up the frequency, to rat out your real identity or location. [34]

Silverpush’s advertising system is embedded into many “free” apps on the Google Play Store. These doctoral researchers warned of the dangers this presents by being connected to wide-spread platforms like Google Ads. To demonstrate this, they played video of their lab experiment, which de-anonymatized a laptop through Tor Browser, because of an Android’s mic next to the laptop’s speakers, which was signed in to a Google account. [34]

Is the Data Sold?

Google has marketing propaganda which claims that they are merely selling advertising space on your devices and not selling the data itself. However, this claim is misleading in a number of ways.

First, not only is advertising sold by demographics or interests, but in addition, Google also allows its advertising customers to target users by name, email, or device ID and reach them almost anywhere. [1] So advertisers can target you specifically and then serve you anything on your specific device by name.

View the 2nd half of this article for free on SimplifiedPrivacy [dot] com, with the sources and the pictures there.