the juicy cow

Today’s trend is to shoot at Facebook and its TOS. It makes us feel good to catalyse our fear of privacy invasion onto one specific place. But the good thing with Facebook is that at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of drunken pictures and a couple of embarrassing philosophical reflections…

So I don’t think that Facebook represents such a danger for our privacy. However what about Google?

Let’s stop our compulsive clicks for 1 second, step back from the computer and think about this: Exactly how much does Google know about you?

In my case, Google knows:

- Who I am, where I live, what I look like (Google Search, Google Account)

- My credit card number and what I buy with it (Google Checkout)

- What I’m doing, when I’m doing it and where (Google Calendar)

- What I read, and more precisely what my favorite sources, topics, authors are. (Google Reader, Google Groups)

- Who my contacts are, what my contact and I are talking about and how frequently we are talking (Gmail)

- Where I am presently (Google Latitude)

- What I am working on (Google Docs)

- What the videos I watch and like are (Youtube)

- The websites I’m browsing and how I browse them (Google Chrome, Google Analytics)

…and more

To reduce the privacy envasion with Facebook it’s quite easy: close your account. Now how could you erase yourself from Google’s memory?

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