The recent Cambridge Analytica breach involving Facebook has consumers concerned about the privacy and security of their personal information, and rightly so. However, one company has been and continues to collect unprecedented amounts of personal data from its users without their knowledge.
Google is arguably a much larger threat than Facebook, considering the volume of information gathering, its tracking capabilities and reach as well as the number of sites and apps available.
Since 2012, Google has been pooling all of the personal information data gathered from its users. To this day, users are subject to having Google collect, among other things, browsing and search history, installed apps, demographics including age and gender, and constant location tracking. Whether or not we reveal who and where we are voluntarily, Google can profile us through the vast amounts of personal data we give it.
For the billion-plus people and businesses with Google accounts, having their personal information hoarded by a company with a vague and confusing privacy policy is deeply concerning. Indeed, in 2016 Google varied its terms of service to allow the merging of its hoard of advertising and tracking data with the personal information collected from Google users.
However, with privacy breaches by companies coming to the forefront of consumer concerns, it won’t be long until Google is fully exposed. In fact, the ACCC is currently investigating Google’s data collection after rival Oracle accused the company of using up to $580 million worth of personal data to continuously track phone user’s movements.
Interestingly, Europe has also put its foot down over concerns for Google’s privacy policy, with the GDPR calling for it to overhaul its policies and allow consumers to better understand their privacy and manage their data.
To promote the efforts to comply with these GDPR privacy protections, Google posted an article recently describing the upcoming updates to the privacy policy. It stated the changes would “make it easier to understand what information we collect, and why we collect it”.[1]
While this sounds promising, there is bad news for Australians. Google has no plans to roll out these GDPR-style protections in every operating country. This means there is a big possibility your information is still being collected with minimal restriction.
Unfortunately, this is a systematic problem whereby companies such as Facebook and Google rely on privacy violation and keeping users in the dark. Essentially, Australian policy-makers must demand an examination of Google’s practices to protect its consumers.
In the meantime, there are steps that consumers can take to limit the amount of information collected by Google. By visiting Google’s timeline page, users can erase and pause their location tracking history. However, to prevent future tracking users would need to opt out of location tracking and reporting on their devices.
Users can also opt out of advertisement personalisation by visiting Google’s ad settings page. Finally, users can keep tabs on the data being collected from them by visiting Google’s Activity Controls link.
You can find out more about the Facebook privacy breach here.
For further information and assistance in protecting your personal or business information online, please do not hesitate to contact Agilient.