You were calm, carefree and life was butter smooth. Another weekend and you were alone in your comfy bed as usual. This question had been bugging you for some time. You didn’t had time the whole week, now you had the kind of solitude you needed for that question.
Your smart speaker was sitting right on the bedside, always listening, the only person you trusted with the most private questions you had from time to time about yourself.
“Hey, Koogle!”, you said.
You waited in anticipation to make that tingling sound and get ready for even the dumbest questions you had.
“Greetings, how may I help you?”, replied Koogle.
You asked your private question, Koogle replied with a descriptive response and presented you with a list of links on your smartphone to help you further investigate. Satisfied with the answers, you carried on with your other chores.
You trusted Koogle but little did you know what it was doing in the background. Koogle had agreement with hundreds (if not thousands) of 3rd parties. The private question you entrusted with Koogle was shared by it to these 3rd parties. These 3rd parties further packaged your private data to its partners.
This data sharing was legal of course, when you first made the Koogle account, it made you sign an agreement that stated:
“We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners — like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. For example, we share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. We also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies.”
Surely the data it shares does not contain your name directly and it becomes non-personally identifiable. But was it really non-identifiable?
Koogle assigned a unique id to each of its account. It kept your data in a package and stamped it with the unique id that it had associated with your account. This package was then provided to its network of 3rd parties at a certain price.
This package contained data about every click you had made on its browser, every order you had placed on e-commerce websites, the political party you followed, the social media accounts you had, every question you had asked to your smart speaker, your gender, at what time did you slept and what time you woke up, etc. The package was of several gigabytes (GB).
Koogle’s partners used this package of data to personalize the advertisements that were shown to you on various websites, video platforms and music streams. From daily household items to political parties, the scope of these ads was vast and limitless. It not only aimed at luring you to buy a product but also wanted to change your political opinion.
You had never wondered how Koogle provided so many of its services free of cost. You were oblivious to the fact that you weren’t the customer in the first place. The customers were those 3rd parties and you were the product.
Want to stop companies from taking away your privacy? You can start by following my article on how you can limit google’s invasive tracking on android and stay tuned for more such articles and claim back your privacy.
