Google and Facebook are taking the littlest of your personal information and making your profile for many reasons, perhaps mostly to send you advertisements of your likes, choosing YouTube playlist for you, but also for reasons unknown. Though all this is between you and your computer, one just needs to know your password to be able to access all this information.
There is a way to start afresh, you can delete this particular information available on https://www.google.com/takeout from all devices you have ever logged in from. This could be your phone, your parents’, friends’, office computer, everywhere.
Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information by going to https://www.facebook.com/settings from your profile. Now, if you don’t delete this information and create a new profile on Facebook, this will always remain stored.
And, even deleting all this information apparently doesn’t help, Dylan Curran, a web developer from Waterford in Ireland, tweeted on March 24 that he has downloaded a 5.5 GB file from Google (3 million word pages) which had data that he had deleted long ago. It contained information which he had “explicitly” deleted he said.
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See Dylan Curran's Tweet:
“Every e-mail I've ever sent, that's been sent to me, including the ones I deleted or were categorised as spam” were stored, said Curran. His Facebook document was roughly 600mb ( 400,000 word documents) which contained information like, who do you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep at, if you're a conservative, if you're a progressive, if you're Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you're feeling depressed or suicidal.
The document Curran downloaded from Google includes "your bookmarks, emails, contacts, Google Drive files (which you have deleted), YouTube videos, photos taken on phone, businesses you've bought from, products you've bought through Google". It also includes "your Google hangout sessions, location history, the phones you've owned, the pages you've shared, how many steps you walk in a day", said Curran. In one part, there was also the information about what time he had left for an interview and what time he arrived at.
Curran wrote on his Twitter timeline that the document he downloaded from Facebook and Google showed that he surfed ThePirateBay section (which is banned). He added, “so much damage this information can do”.
One way to look at it is, that storing all this data is going to be helpful when you have to delete this particular account. You can download all your important and memorable information. But the other way is to be alert that this private information of yours is not very difficult to be misused.
