Google Account Activity (beta) – Now We Know :)

If you have a Google account, you can now enable new feature called Account Activity, to get interesting stats about your time spent on the Internet. Because of recent changes in Google’s new unified privacy policy, this is Google’s attempt to make all that data more transparent. Transparency is better than no transparency, if you ask me, but..
To be honest, now when I see all that information that Google knows about me, it really is a bit scary :D… It knows how much time do I spend at work and how much time do I spend at home. It knows places I visited (Latitude), videos I watched (YouTube), music I listened (Google Music), web history (pages I visited and searched), people I contacted (Gmail), and that is not all :)… There are also some things which are not shown at the moment. For example, data from AdSense, Webmasters Tools, Google Analytics, Docs, etc. To see the whole list of data collecting services, check out this great article about how and which data Google collects about us.

Should I be worried? 

Although in Account Activity I can see stats starting from February 29, 2012., I am not fooled :). Google has all my data from the first day I opened my Google account. But, since now it is transparent, it is a bit less confusing, because they aren’t trying to hide the fact that they want to know everything about me, anymore. But why? Why do they do that? Although it is not obvious at first, it is Google’s biggest source of income. Well, Google does not sell my information, but it uses it to, for example, show me relevant ads and personalized searches. But, why do we still use Google products if we know all this? We silently accept this fact? Maybe data collection is a good thing? Who should be afraid of personal data being stored and remembered? Will we be able to search our personal past and memories? Wait, all my information in the hands of private company, wtf? Hm, can Google know what my personality is? Health? Will Google some day really sell my data to someone else? Will Google know what I want before I even think about it? Will Google be able to find the perfect women for me? :)… Maybe I got carried away a bit, but we don’t really know what future brings…
The fact is that we don’t have to use Google, nor Facebook, nor any other data collecting service on the Internet, if we don’t want to. But, do we lose something by not using their services? Are there alternatives?

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