The biggest problem of FB and Google is not what you know they know about you. It’s what you don’t.

In last few weeks or so there is a lot of buzz about privacy breaching from your best friends Google and Facebook (and alikes — I am sure there will be more of that coming).

But nothing of this is in any way shocking if you at least a bit follow shady principles they were quite obviously using for years.

Why did they do that? It’s their business model — follow the money they always said.

Ok, to be honest, If I would be Google of Facebook I would also try to build the profile around you. And this means getting single point of data I can grab from you.

Having a profile about you of course can help them to target ads better and be more efficient.

But it also gives them a huge advantage in other fields like AI or behavioural and cognitive knowledge (do a home work and watch Ex Machine movie if you haven’t yet).

Just an example what they surely collect is:

• What you write into the input box and then delete: well, was it something inappropriate — this says a lot about you.
• Every time you put wrong email into login field: now we have another email from you, also we know that you can do these mistakes.
• More obvious, but you use Facebook on a controlled matter, but you act way more loosely with your quite secretive Instagram account, that is… well well, connected your FB account. And also add WhatsApp here (right, this one is end-to-end encrypted ;)

But the biggest problem is the data they collect and you have no clue about. Let me make you paranoid with two cases:

1. Browser fingerprinting provides all these shady things about you

So without getting too much into tech details, browser fingerprinting tries to identify you as an single browsing person and then follow what you do on internet — where and what you browse.

Google and FB are able to follow you even if you are not logged in to FB (or Google services). Even more, they can also follow you if you use separate browsers for the tasks and what’s even more problematic, they have great tools to follow you if you try to protect yourself from these technics.

Now just imagine that you have one of these lonely moments and you go to some adult site, browsing a bit around. Well, you might write on FB that you prefer gentle loving, but you online behaviour tells a bit different story. And FB knows ;).

Now extend this to some things that you might find even more private, like using Tor and you feel safe with it. Well think again.

Learn more about browser fingerprinting.

2. Face recognition everywhere

Ok I would do extensive face recognition on every pic ever posted on FB. This would give me a great opportunity to follow people all around the globe even on a shadow spots (so where they can’t follow you — yet; or correction — Google can though Android and FB though one of their apps).

So imagine a nice Japanese tourist taking a photo of some monument in Barcelona. It also catches you there as an innocent passenger. She excitingly posts this pic on FB and well, FB probably know you are there too!

You might not have problem with this, at least not yet. But think again about building full scale profiles of humanity.

You owe this data, right?

This is not something you gave them for free, right?

(Don’t kill me, I have no time to edit this post)