With the current #DeleteFacebook movement gaining steam after a former employee came out with allegations and evidence regarding data access malpractices at the Social Media giant it’s hard to post a picture on the platform without doubting who else will see it.

Quite recently, Facebook asked its users to upload their nudes. No ulterior motives there as per Facebook but to recognize and remove those photos if someone embarks on a revenge porn saga.

However, now all intentions must be questioned.

I don’t think the delete facebook campaign, first heralded by Whatsapp’s founder is going to go anywhere. Few who didn’t know about it might now be more alert but the vast majority won’t budge.

Facebook has downplayed the seriousness by brushing off the allegations. The official blogpost reads that there was no hack per se and all those gave the information gave it willingly.

The information given willingly was to an app that claimed to be testing psychology. That combined with the whistleblower’s allegations that third-parties had the freedom to do whatever they wanted with the data, raises serious questions about how our privacy is handled.

That comes from a guy who called people dumb fucks back in 2004 and tapes his PC’s audio input and camera hole.

However, I digress.

And I should probably be talking about Google now.

Google’s another digital giant that thrives on user data. Perhaps that’s why China asked them to leave the country.

There’s no doubt that Google hogs petabytes of user data- all for the company to use as it may. Bing’s developing and bettering AI algorithms based on the tiny search engine market share they were able to steal.

Imagine how many more experiments could Google do with 70% search engine market share.

If that weren’t enough, they rolled out the best mobile OS- Android and distributed it to everyone for free.

With the only caveat being to include Google as the default search engine. With mobile data access it knows where you go, where you shit, what places you eat and shop at and uses that data to build personified ad profiles.

To understand how Google targets you visit this page and look for ad permissions.

http://myaccount.google.com/permissions

You’ll see which advertisers are able to advertise to you and why some advertiser dogs you constantly.

Again, with almost all useful services being integrated with Google- Gmail, Gsuite, docs, sheets, photos, Google voice and everything else, every minute of every day you’re feeding it data that it can never say enough to.

In order to check all the data that Google has about you visit the following site:

http://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

And download your data.

You will know the extent only when you visit the page. Screenshot below.