<story><title>Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google</title><url>https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>&amp;gt; They&amp;#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them&lt;p&gt;But if they don&amp;#x27;t know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to?&lt;p&gt;The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?</text></item><item><author>akie</author><text>&amp;gt; But I can&amp;#x27;t imagine Google would know how to do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.</text></item><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate portrayal?&lt;p&gt;Like, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on a web project that doesn&amp;#x27;t contain &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise.&lt;p&gt;But, I just can&amp;#x27;t imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwkrt</author><text>You’re not thinking on a big enough scale. No big tech company cares about “your” data. They care about everyone’s data in aggregate as much as they can get from every location at every granularity. Even thinking of a tech company as collecting all of “your” data to create an ad profile “for you” is rather inaccurate. They’re collecting everyone’s data to create an ad profile for everybody, tailored to what makes the most money in aggregate across all ad slots.&lt;p&gt;When you think of it like this you’ll stop asking questions like “what would they do with this piece of data?” Because the answer is always that it is a drop in a giant ocean of machine learning data.</text></comment>
<story><title>Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google</title><url>https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>&amp;gt; They&amp;#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them&lt;p&gt;But if they don&amp;#x27;t know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to?&lt;p&gt;The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?</text></item><item><author>akie</author><text>&amp;gt; But I can&amp;#x27;t imagine Google would know how to do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.</text></item><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate portrayal?&lt;p&gt;Like, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on a web project that doesn&amp;#x27;t contain &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise.&lt;p&gt;But, I just can&amp;#x27;t imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weberer</author><text>If the requests are client side, they know that the user has accessed your domain. They can analyze the frequency and timestamps of these requests and add that information to the ad profile they have built for that user.</text></comment>