Google and Facebook (now part of Meta) know a great deal about most internet users: what you search for, which sites you visit, where your phone has been, who you message and what you watch. They collect it mainly to target advertising, and they disclose much of it in their privacy policies. Privacy is not quite dead, though. Laws have tightened since this post first appeared in 2013, regulators have fined both companies, and you can see, limit and delete much of what is stored. This guide explains what is collected, what the big privacy fights revealed, and the practical steps that actually reduce your footprint.
Why privacy is a people problem, not just a tech problem
Privacy is often framed as hiding secrets, but it is really about control: who can collect information that identifies you, how they combine it, and what they are allowed to do with it. A single search or "like" reveals little. Millions of them, linked to one account over years, can reveal health worries, politics, relationships and finances. That is why privacy law focuses on personally identifiable information and on consent rather than on any particular technology.
Google's 2012 policy change and what regulators decided
On 1 March 2012 Google replaced roughly 60 separate privacy policies with one. The change let the company treat a signed-in user as a single person across Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps and its other services, combining data to personalise results and ads. Google presented it as simpler and more useful; critics saw a giant step toward one unified profile, and many users clicked "dismiss" on the notice without reading it.
European regulators were not persuaded. On 8 January 2014 France's data-protection authority, CNIL, fined Google €150,000, finding that it had not told users clearly enough how their data would be used, had not asked permission before setting cookies, and had combined data across services without a legal basis. The fine was small for a company of Google's size, but it set the tone for the stricter European rules that followed.
Facebook, Assange and the surveillance debate
In a May 2011 interview with RT, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook "the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented", arguing that US intelligence agencies could reach the personal data that users willingly uploaded. Facebook replied that it responds only to compulsory legal process, not to pressure.
Two years later, documents leaked by Edward Snowden in June 2013 described PRISM, an NSA programme that collects stored communications from major US internet companies under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The slides named firms including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, YouTube and Apple. The companies denied giving the government "direct access" to their servers, and later reporting suggested data was handed over under court-approved orders rather than through an open back door. So Assange's broad claim was partly borne out, in that governments do obtain platform data at scale, while the exact mechanism he described remains disputed.
Facebook's own record also explains the distrust. Its 2007 Beacon feature broadcast users' purchases on other websites to their friends, triggered a class action and was shut down in 2009. In 2018 it emerged that data from up to 87 million profiles had been harvested through a personality quiz and passed to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. In 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over privacy violations, and the UK regulator issued a £500,000 fine.
What these companies can learn about you
The 2013 version of this post reproduced a widely shared list of 25 things Google knows about you. Several of the products on it, including Google Reader, Google Health, Latitude, Checkout, Orkut, Picasa and Flu Trends, have since been closed. The underlying categories, however, are still accurate:
- Searches and browsing: what you look up, and, through advertising and analytics code on other websites, many of the pages you visit.
- Location: where your phone has been, from GPS, Wi-Fi and cell signals, if location history or similar settings are on.
- Communications and files: email, calendars and documents stored in cloud services, which are processed to run those services.
- Viewing and listening: what you watch on YouTube or interact with on Facebook and Instagram.
- Purchases and payments: data from ads you click, shopping searches and payment services.
- Social graph: who your friends are, whom you message and which groups or pages you follow.
- Inferences: interests, age range and other traits the platforms guess from all of the above to target ads.
"Privacy is dead": the Steven Rambam talk
The second video below is a long talk by the American private investigator Steven Rambam, titled "Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It". Running close to three hours, it walks through how much can be pieced together about a person from public records, social networks, blogs and commercial databases, and how ordinary companies mine customer data. Some of the specific tools he mentions are dated, but his central point has aged well: data that seems harmless on its own becomes revealing once someone combines it.
What has changed since 2013
The biggest shift is legal. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), adopted in 2016 and applied from 25 May 2018, gives people in the EU rights to access their data, have it erased in many circumstances and move it to another service. Serious breaches can be fined up to €20 million or 4% of a company's worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. Other countries and several US states have since passed their own privacy laws.
The platforms have also built dashboards that let users see and delete activity, pause location tracking and turn off ad personalisation. These tools are imperfect and the defaults still favour collection, but they are far more than existed when this post was first written.
Practical ways to use less Google and Facebook
Google's products are popular because many of them are excellent, so think about which features you genuinely need before switching everything. Useful steps include:
- Review your account settings. Check your Google and Meta privacy dashboards, set activity and location history to auto-delete or turn them off, and switch off ad personalisation.
- Try a privacy-focused search engine. DuckDuckGo, founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, says it does not keep IP addresses or build profiles and shows ads based only on the current search. Startpage, based in the Netherlands, pays Google for its results and strips out trackers and logs; note that it has been majority-owned by the US ad company System1 since 2019, a deal that initially worried some privacy reviewers. The 2013 post also recommended Scroogle, which no longer operates, and Gibiru.
- Limit cross-site tracking. Use a browser with built-in tracker blocking, clear cookies regularly and log out of accounts when you do not need them.
- Share less by default. The oldest advice is still the best: if it is truly private, do not post it on a social network.
Myths worth dropping
"I have nothing to hide." Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing; it is about deciding who knows what, and preventing data from being used against your interests by companies, criminals or governments.
"Incognito mode makes me invisible." Private browsing mainly stops your own device from saving history. Websites, your employer or your internet provider can still see activity.
"Deleting the app deletes my data." Usually it does not. You need to delete the account or use the platform's data-deletion tools.
Sources: PCWorld: French regulator fines Google over privacy policy change (8 January 2014); PCWorld: Julian Assange calls Facebook an appalling spying machine (2 May 2011); Wikipedia: PRISM; Wikipedia: Facebook Beacon; Wikipedia: Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal; Wikipedia: General Data Protection Regulation; Killed by Google; Wikipedia: DuckDuckGo; Wikipedia: Startpage; talk by Steven Rambam, "Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It" (video above).
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