By Hank Kee
Topic of the Month: Do You Know Who Has Your Personal Data?
Besides Facebook and Google, do you know who has your data? What are they doing with that data? Have you heard of Google Timeline? What is Google Timeline?
I recently received an email from Google Timeline. Google has information on me that dates back to 2009. What is Google Timeline? Google Timeline can be accessed via https://www.google.com/maps/timeline.
Google first rolled it out during the summer of 2015. Timeline is sort of like a life log tool—it tracks all the places you’ve visited over a specific period of time.
Wait, how did they have history on me that dates back to 2009? It is from the GPS that is in my cell phone. It matters not that the cell may have been turned off.
How accurate is it? I guess I shouldn’t be helping them do quality assurance for their product. The information is only where I have been in the 48 contiguous states. If you have been traveling overseas, it was not recorded. If you’ve been to Alaska, it seems to also miss that fact. The places cited were not 100% accurate. I was recently dining at a particular restaurant and it was misidentified as the next-door restaurant. Can you imagine if it hadn’t been a restaurant but a funeral home, and I started getting information on different styles of caskets?
Now we have Facebook where their primary revenue is from over 98 data points of information they have on you in their database. Facebook keeps ads “useful and relevant” in four distinct ways. It tracks your on-site activity, such as the pages you like and the ads you click, and your device and location settings, such as the brand of phone you use and your type of Internet connection. Your personal data has become the product they sell to advertisers.
Facebook began speaking with hospitals last year about the possibility of matching anonymized user profiles with health data in an effort to improve medical care. Facebook has since said it had hit “pause” on the program last month—presumably following the Cambridge Analytica scandal—to focus on “doing a better job of protecting people’s data” and being clearer about how it’s used.
Now Facebook has announced up to 90 million accounts may have been breached. They have stated that they don’t know what information may have been accessed.
But if you think it is just big tech that has your information, under the radar is the Federal government. There is census data that are individually identifiable. The term “publicly available” is intended to refer to record sets that are truly readily available to the broad public, such as census data.
Not to be outdone, Boards of Elections in the nation readily make available their data. Information goes back to over 20 years. Even if you moved or changed party affiliations, the information is tracked.
When I first read the science fiction novel 1984 by George Orwell, I didn’t think it would be reality so soon.
—hank@pcradioshow.org
This article is part of a monthly column by the New York Amateur Computer Club (NYACC), one of the oldest computer clubs in the world, and is intended to help you turn your computer into a friend. See more and contact NYACC directly at www.nyacc.org
