Google is one of the things we use most in our daily lives, whether it is to search for news, games, information in general, among others. When we search for these things, Google collects all the information to give us recommendations on things that may interest us. Sounds nice, right? Well it is not entirely.

Besides Google, other search engines do exactly the same thing. In addition to making everything easier for us by giving us personalized information, personal information about us, such as where we live, our name, social relationships, etc…is stored.

Search engines are not necessarily going to tell us that they have this information, but we can see it in some details.

For example, as I mention in “About“, I am from the Caribbean, meaning that I also speak Spanish but I, out of habit, like to have my social networks in English. Surprisingly, Google always gives me the option to change my language to Spanish, but not to any type of Spanish, to Latin American Spanish. This tells me that Google already knows my location, without necessarily telling me.

In addition to knowing your location, if you have accessed a personal page of a social network, even if you log out, that information stays on the internet. It’s not going to be that easy to access it again without your password, but its not impossible.

Jordi Pérez Colomé in EL PAIS, which stand for the country in English, talks about how Facebook and Twitter know your profile even if you don’t have an account, delete it or don’t use it. Here they talk about what I just explained but with social media accounts.

Now, this doesn’t seem as cute as we thought at first, right?

Well, there’s more…

In another page, written by Brian X. Chen in New York Times, he discovers all the information Facebook has about him by downloading the data. He mentions that he rarely posts things or shares information, which took him by surprise when he saw all the personal information he saw about himself.

If you want to know how to access these and how to know the information google has about you, you can use this link to help you out. Here Dylan Curran talks about all the data Facebook and Google have about you.

Stay safe and even if we can’t protect all of our information, let’s make the most of it by avoiding to share as much personal information as posible. ?