Google & Facebook Know Everything About You, and it's Scarier Than You Think. Here is How to Find Out What Information They Have (tutorial)

With all the latest scandals around Cambridge Analytica and #DeleteFacebook campaign, more and more people want to know what information Google and Facebook really have about them.

When you ask people: What do you think, what Google or Facebook knows about you? They will tell you: probably everything. But still, when you show them what information they have, people are quite shocked.

In the last few days, I noticed some tweets related to the subject. One was retweeted by Edward Snowden (and later I found more) about how to download all the data that Google and Facebook own about you. It is literally your personal file, a dossier.

Here is how to download your Google FIle:

Go to https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (you must be logged in to your Google account).
Click ‘next’ on the bottom of the page.
After this, click on the ‘create archive’ button on the bottom of the page.
After some time (around 2 hrs) you will get the email with the download link. Download the zip files, unzip them and you will be able to see the data.

How to download you Facebook Data:

Log in to your Facebook account.
Go to https://www.facebook.com/settings
Click 'Download a copy of your data' Click on start my archive button
Re-enter your password and again click on ‘start my archive’ button
Click on ‘okay’ button.
You will get the notification on Facebook (in less than 5 minutes probably). Click on the notification.
After page loads, click on the ‘download archive’ button.
Re-enter the password.
Once it's downloaded, you can open it to extract all the files.

My Google zip file was around 6 GiB large and Facebook 114 MiB

Now let see what information are stored there:

Facebook has:

All your messages (written, images, audio and video),
All your images and videos,
Your profile info,
What ad topics you are suitable for (for example: digital data, comedy movies, etc.),
What ads you have clicked on,
What apps you have connected with Facebook (even sites where you logged in with facebook account)
The exact times when you used Facebook with Ip addresses, browser, device, etc.
Events you have visited
All your friends and dates when you became friends
All your phone contacts
For some reason all the stickers you ever used in your messages

It doesn’t seem very scary, but if some person would have access to all that data it would be very uncomfortable.

Just imagine all the possibilities if you would have this info about someone. You could probably ruin someone’s life.

And don’t forget those are only the information they provided you. There are no guarantees that there are no more information on some parallel secret database.

With Google it’s even worse. Available information includes:

Your bookmarks
Your calendar
Your browser history
Extensions that you use
Your contacts
All your Google Drive files
Google my businesses you manage
All your images with its metadata (location, time, etc.)
Your google hangouts
All your searches (google, locations, images, youtube...)
Your youtube history, your youtube search history and subscriptions
Your Google+ profile and pages information
All the apps you searched for, installed on your android device and apps usage
For some reason all the Help/support pages you visited
All your emails
What ad groups you are suitable for
Google books you have purchased
And the spookiest of all, Google stores all your locations if you bring your android phone: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

Image by Dylan Curran:

Dylan Mckay mentioned in his tweet that Facebook stored information on every call and SMS he made with metadata (time, duration, etc.), but I couldn’t find those information. Maybe they removed the option after the tweet, or there is some other reason for that…

Here are 2 tweets explaining everything:
https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran/status/977559925680467968
https://twitter.com/dylanmckaynz/status/976368845635035138

Imagine if someone had all this information about you. Imagine if someone sold that information or simply forward it to someone.

What if you leave your laptop unprotected and some of your friends and colleagues download these information, would you feel safe?

If you new all this before you created Google or Facebook account, would you still use it?

I would like to hear your opinion in the comments.