Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google

In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts. Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we’ve installed, demographics such as age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we’ve shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn’t use information from “sensitive categories” such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health. Because it relies on cross-device tracking, it can spot logged-in users no matter which device they’re on. This is why Google and Facebook are dominant in online advertising. By pouring huge amounts of our personal data into the latest artificial-intelligence technology, they can determine who—and where—we really are, whether or not we reveal ourselves voluntarily.