I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.
The closest thing is Google’s ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they’ve browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could’ve used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren’t even aware of it.
The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn’t be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the ‘deep web’ for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?
Show them the consequeces. You might scare a few people who are already anxious by showing data collected, but most people will be apathetic. Illustrate why its bad. Be systemic about it.
The stunt outlined elsewhere of texting someone with their info is good, but “we all know google isn’t going to threaten us” is the prevailing attitude. Demonstrate what google is going to do and how it hurts people individualy and directly. Until there are personal consequences, peopae won’t really care.
I used to have a plugin that mapped how many companies were getting data from the website I was on. I’m not sure if it still exists.
One eye opener that’s easily accessible is going into their Facebook third party data agreements. If it’s not turned off they’ll probably be shocked about how permissive the data is. Just visiting a website can result in a Facebook agreement to share data with that company. It’s one of the reasons apps suddenly know random things you were just talking to somebody about. It gets keyed up instantly and they start that whole analysis of shadow profiles stuff industry experts talk about.
If you’re willing to spend 40$, various data brokers will sell you all the information people in this thread have mentioned
Just send them the new report on Nissan of the Mozilla foundation 😂
