Business details displayed on Google come from a variety of different sources. They’re meant to provide customers with the most complete and up-to-date information possible. The details associated with your business come from the information you provide when creating and updating a verified business listing, reports from users, and other sources.
Information in Google My Business
For example, if customers search for a restaurant you manage, they can find information you've added, such as when you're open and where you're located. They also might get information you haven't added, such as a link to your menu or photos customers have uploaded of meals they've enjoyed. The combination of information provided by you and other sources lets customers make informed decisions about your location. Users may also find personalized recommendations and matches based on their preferences.
How Google sources business information
There are 4 main sources of information that you may find in your business listing:
- you: Information you've added about your business. You can add, edit, and remove this information as it changes to keep customers up to date and showcase your products and services. Learn how to manage your business information.
- Your website: Information from your business's official website.
- Users: Information from people who use Google services. Google gets a wide variety of information about businesses from its users. This user-generated information includes reviews, popular times, and photos. Your Business Profile is updated when someone takes an action like leaving a review, uploading a photo, or reporting a problem.
- Third party sources: Information from other places online. If Google finds information about your business that could be helpful to customers, it may be added to your listing. This can include links to restaurant menus, social profiles , hotel amenities , or booking/ticketing availability .
Information in local search results
Google uses business information to help surface relevant local search results across Google, such as in Google Maps and Search.
For example, if you own a hair salon, your business might appear in local search results for people who search for “salons near me” or “salons open now” because you’ve provided information that includes your address and hours.
Internet companies earn on the data of their users, knowing about our preferences allows us to show the most relevant ads to us. Every user activity on the Internet is tracked. . Now we have figured out what can be useful from the database that Google collects.
How does Google collect information?
The origins of the search engine google.com was a scientific project of Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In March 1996 they launched their first search robot, on September 15, 1997 they registered the www.google.com domain. The company was officially established on September 4, 1998, and in October 2015, Google Inc. reorganized into the international conglomerate Alphabet Inc. For less than 20 years, only those who have never accessed the Internet have not used the holding's technological products. Now the company has more than a hundred different services, programs and applications that represent an entire ecosystem.
All information is linked to your Gmail account. The principle is quite simple: applications and services provide more options or do not work at all without authorization, and at the first launch they ask for permission to collect personal data to improve the algorithms. Surveillance can be disabled by sacrificing some conveniences (sometimes even without loss), but, as practice shows, almost no one reads the license agreement. The mobile phone tells the most about you, especially on the Android platform.
First of all, the company collects data in order to sell more personalized advertising. Also, collecting information about the operation of applications helps to speed up and improve their functionality. Each user becomes an almost free tester, and this significantly reduces the final cost of the product.
What does Google know about you?
Google may know more about its users than their close friends. In addition, the "corporation of good" stores information that you have long forgotten.
Here is a partial list of user data that is stored by Google: name; floor; birthday; personal numbers and contacts; search queries and surfing the Internet; preferences and hobbies; movement in the real world, including favorite places, place of work, which route you get to it and what transport; in some cases, the system has a recording of your voice and even the ability to identify you from a photograph.
In the settings of the google account, all information is distributed in three main sections "Security and Entry", "Confidentiality" And "Account settings".
Find the lost, limit the suspicious
In section "Security and Entry" can enhance security your account; change password and add backup mail; step by step instructions find lost phone, which uses your account, and if the device is on the Android platform, you can block it and write a message to the finder.
Be sure to check on which devices, at what time and even in what place your account is used, as well as suspicious activity. If you notice anything strange, you should immediately change the password, and for reliability, you can add two-step authentication;
At the very bottom of the section security there is a switch that is responsible for automatically blocking unreliable applications, you can also audit manually in the subsection "Apps that have access to the account". If you click on any applications in the list that appears, detailed information will unfold, what privileges the program has. It is worth taking a closer look at the list and turning off what you have not used for a long time or what you do not trust.
Google knows where you were last summer
Confidential Section- a real find for a spy. To get started, in a couple of clicks you can rewrite personal information.
All contacts from mail and applications, as well as phone numbers from synchronized devices are in the corresponding tab. In the "More" section of the side menu, you can make a copy or, conversely, download new contacts from the archive and other services, and the tab just above will show who you often communicate with.
Then it is useful to look into the settings tracking your activities. You can prohibit or, conversely, allow the collection of information from devices, the transmission of search history, locations, voice control and YouTube views. Each item has a short description, and the decision is made in one click on the slider on the right.
In a separate window, you can see the history of your actions: search queries, including voice queries, watched videos and visited sites. The search bar has a built-in filtering function by service name, subject and date. By the same criteria, you can clear the history by clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner of each block or using the special delete history tab.
Timeline on Google Maps shows the places you have visited. You can see when you were there by double-clicking on the mark. Also in the menu, which is located in the upper left corner, you can select the day, month, year to see your route for that day, but not earlier than when it was this function is enabled. Every year the service improves: the later the chronology, there is more and more accurate information in it, up to the transport on which you traveled. If necessary, each entry can be deleted by clicking on the trash can icon.
myaccount.google.com
There is no separate link to Google Photos settings in the menu, although Android devices usually have the program by default. If desired, it can be installed on Apple products. Many users do not notice that the application, synchronizing with a google account, stores photos on the network. Only the owner of the account has access to them, but in the settings you can create shared albums. The quality of the saved photos is also selected there. The original occupies the volume of the Google drive, and the compressed one has no restrictions. In the settings, you can give permission to group photos with similar faces, this will make it possible to link photos of a person to his contact.
The service itself is quite convenient, it allows you to find photos by date, location, or you can simply enter what you are looking for in the search bar. If you want to delete everything from the Google servers, be sure to turn off the synchronization in the application on your devices so that the photos from them do not disappear.
Screenshot photos.google.com
What are they advertising to you and why?
Advertising Preferences collected based on your gender, age and interests. If the list of interesting topics includes something that does not interest or dislike you, then each of the items can be rewritten or blocked at your discretion.
If you deactivate the switch in the right corner of the top panel, then personalized advertising in Google partner networks will be disabled, and at the link at the bottom of the page - on third party services.
Users are given the right to install a plug-in from Google in the browser, it will block ad personalization, even if it is enabled in the account settings: for Chrome, Mozila Firefox and Internet Explorer.
It is worth recalling that in both cases, advertising will not disappear anywhere: it will be less relevant; some ads cannot be blocked or muted; most often, the ads will be based on the content of the web page that is exposed.
There are applications that completely block ads in the browser, but then the sites you visit will stop earning.
How to delete and backup all data
In the depths of the privacy settings is the transition to your personal account. It provides a list of the main services and their content. Each tile is clickable, when clicked, it gives detailed information, and in the right corner of the drop-down list, the ellipsis will bring up an additional menu, which, for some services, allows you to download all the information or delete it.
To download everything that Google keeps about you in a few clicks, you need to go to the export menu. In it, you can select the services you need, or just click next, and then an additional menu will appear. In it, you can select the archive format (including splitting the archive into several parts), as well as a service or a download link. An old account can collect tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of data. Therefore, it takes from a couple of hours to several days to create an archive. When it is ready, the system will notify you by mail.
Screenshot takeout.google.com
The delete data menu is divided into deleting service accounts YouTube, Google+, Play Games and Gmail. The user also has the option total destruction in section "Account settings", where you will be asked twice for confirmation, as a complete cleaning will affect many useful services associated with the account. For example, Internet banking can be tied to Gmail. Just in case, you can leave a path for recovery by adding backup mail and phone in the appropriate columns.
For emergencies, if something happens and you will not use your account for a long time, choose a friend or relative who will have access to your data. In the menu, you need to select the period of inactivity (from 3 to 18 months), the list of data and the person who will receive it. After the specified period, the account will be blocked, and the trusted person will receive an SMS message with access to the mail. You can also set everything to be destroyed automatically 3 months after deactivation.
Few users think about security and privacy online. Very often we go online and log in to personal accounts from various devices - from smartphones and computers that are available to other users. In addition, modern sites and web services collect a large amount of statistics and user data. Google is no exception. In fact, Google knows more about you than you can imagine. So, what is so interesting Google knows about us users?
Google has developed a lot of services that are used by more than 1 billion people around the world. This is a search engine (google), mail (gmail), Google Earth (Google Earth), maps (Google Maps), YouTube (Youtube) and others. Each of these services collects user data that is used for effective online advertising and other purposes known only to Google.
Websites that share user information with Google
Google uses its own services in which users provide up-to-date information about themselves. In this case, you agree that the data specified when registering accounts are real, and also give your consent to the processing of personal data by Google. I doubt that more than 1% of users from the CIS countries read the terms of the user agreement or the public offer in full before clicking "Agree" and starting to use the service or program.
In addition, the company collects numerous technical data and parameters related to the software and technical characteristics of the user's devices (computer, mobile phone from which Google services were logged in).
Which sites report user data to Google
There are not too many sites that send user data to Google. But the specifics of the information received by Google allows us to assess the extent of "surveillance" of users.
Google+ Profile
A personal profile on Google+ is similar to pages on other social networks. You fill in the basic data - your age, gender, main interests (you agree to the processing of these data by Google). This data is taken into account when selecting appropriate advertisements that will be shown to you on the pages of partner sites using Google.Adwords. Detailed user information is available at www.google.com/ads/preferences/
User location and movement history
If you are using an Android smartphone, it has the ability and ability to send your current position and speed to Google. In addition, some applications require permission to send the coordinates of the user's device in order to work correctly. You probably noticed that when you are in a certain location, a notification appears on your smartphone about the possibility of uploading photos and descriptions for this place. You can view your location history and output it to maps.google.com/locationhistory
Google search history
Google constantly monitors the queries that the user asks the search engine, especially if the user is logged into one of the Google services. In this case, the sent requests are encrypted and hidden from the built-in statistics systems. The user's reaction to pop-up ads and any user behavior with search results is also tracked and controlled. This is used to improve search algorithms, select more relevant (corresponding) ads history.google.com
Login devices
Google keeps track of devices, IP addresses, locations, access methods to its own services and Google user accounts. The user can view the corresponding lists and find out if someone else uses his Google accounts and services security.google.com/settings/security/activity
List of applications that have access to your Google data
This list shows applications that can work with personal data of Google users. The user can see what rights and opportunities these programs have, as well as change the level of access to personal data security.google.com/settings/security/permissions
Export Google user data
Users of Google services have the option to export or archive their personal data from their google accounts. Information from the following applications and services is available for export: bookmarks, mail, contacts, calendar, files from Drive, youtube videos, picasa photos, etc. www.google.com/takeout
| How are you? - |
The collection of user data allowed Google at one of its annual developer conferences to announce several of its new developments: an assistant that can make phone appointments and set up suggestions on Google Maps, a feature that will complete sentences for you.
The development of such technologies has largely become possible thanks to the massive collection of data. Google services collect data from billions of users every day. This is one of the conditions for using free services. Many people don't even think about it. But the one who owns the information owns the world.
Google has seven products, each with at least 1 billion monthly active users, and they can't operate without access to user data. According to a Morning Consult survey, this helped make Google one of the most famous brands in the world.
The well-known Cambridge Analytica scandal led to a tightening of privacy laws, and the company at the center of the scandal was declared bankrupt.
Google is on thin ice
Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie says:
“Search, as well as mobile devices equipped with Google Play, perfectly understand their user. This understanding is achieved through the collection and storage of your personal data.
Facebook had a stated policy for the last three years that most of us found acceptable until Cambridge Analytica came to light."
Where does the data come from?
The more Google products you use, the more data Google may collect about you. Whether it's Gmail, the Android operating system for smartphones, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps and, of course, Google Search, the company collects gigabytes of data about you.
Google offers free access to its services by showing you targeted ads that generated $31.2 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2018 alone.
The company's data collection practices also include email scanning to extract keyword data for use in other Google products and services and to improve its machine learning capabilities. This information was confirmed by the representative of Google Aaron Stein.
“We can analyze [email] content to fine-tune search results to better detect spam and malware,” he added.
But that is not all. Google claims that it is also using some of its datasets to "help build the next generation of next-generation AI solutions." On Tuesday, Google released "Smart Replies," in which artificial intelligence helps users complete sentences.
Information technology consultant Dylan Curran recently uploaded everything he had on Facebook and received a 600mb file. A similar file with personal data from Google was 5.5 gigabytes, which is nine times more!
“This is one of the craziest things in the modern age, we would never allow a government or a corporation to put cameras or microphones in our homes or track location on us, but we went ahead and did it ourselves because… I want to watch videos of cute kitties and dogs,” Curran wrote.
What does Google guarantee?
The Company has set various limits on the use of this data. The Company does not sell your personal information, anonymizes user data after 18 months, and invites users to delete some or all of the collected personal data. These innovations make it harder for marketers who are trying to identify your beliefs, sexual interests, or personal difficulties.
However, this does not prevent the company from selling advertising itself, the reach of which can be narrowed down to the user's zip code. Combined with a sufficient number of other interest categories and user behaviors, it is easier for Google advertisers to identify the target audience, and therefore create the most successful advertising campaigns.
What can you do about it?
Users can see and limit the data collected by Google by changing their advertising preferences.
The internet giant offers customizable controls to opt out of being tracked by Google's advertising cookie, as well as limit whether you show targeted ads based on your interest groups and categories. You can also view and delete many personal tracking data about yourself, including your entire search history and any geolocation data that may have tracked your every physical move if you are signed into Google services on your phone.
"We provide users with controls to remove individual items, services, or their entire account," Stein told Google. “When a user decides to delete data, we go through a process over time to safely and completely remove it from our systems, including backups. We retain some data with a user's Google account, such as when and how they use certain features, until the account is deleted."
Does not collect information for sale, or even more so in the interests of some universal conspiracy.
Everything is much more prosaic: personal information helps to determine the tastes and habits of users. To do this, Google stores data about the gender, age, interests, as well as user search queries, including voice ones.
For example, after analyzing the requests of a single person, the search engine will offer goods or services related to the object of previous requests. For example, if a user was looking for where to buy a smartphone, then contextual advertising will offer accessories for this phone model.
Another object of controversy is the collection of information about the location of its customers by the “corporation of good”, which makes especially nervous ones constantly turn off the transfer of geodata.
Google collects data on the movement of users using their own smartphones: when using, for example, the Google Maps service, the owner of the device gives out his location. The time during which a particular user was in a certain place, and even the speed of movement, is recorded.
Thanks to this information, the search engine will issue places that provide certain services closest to the user, again consistent with his interests.
Not everyone will like the fact that a huge multinational corporation has so much of his personal data. Of course, you can turn off some of the "tracking" services, but most are unlikely to refuse, for example, watching videos on YouTube just so that Google does not recognize the user's preferences.
One example of users outraged by the "violation of privacy" was Anton Burkov, who filed a lawsuit against Google for the fact that the corporation, in his opinion, read his personal correspondence. Burkov demanded 50 thousand rubles from the company. for moral damage. decided to recover the full amount from the defendant, but Google's lawyers appealed the court's decision. As a result, the Moscow City Court dismissed the company's claim, obliging Google to pay 50 thousand rubles. However, the company can still appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
However, Google is far from the only company accumulating the personal data of its customers.
The number of companies that “monitor” the users of their services also includes, which not so long ago was subjected to a flurry of criticism due to the huge amount of data collected by the latest version of the operating system from Microsoft - Windows 10.
How to relate to the collection of data by organizations whose services are used by tens of millions of people every day is an open question. On the one hand, in the event of a software failure or hacking of data storages by hackers, the scale of the "drain" of personal information will be simply catastrophic: the confidential data of millions of people will become public, and the corporation that leaked will be inundated with lawsuits from outraged users. Of course, each company does everything possible to prevent such incidents.
On the other hand, the collection of personal data brings the quality of the services offered to a new level. This practice allows a simple user to "surf" the Internet with much greater comfort, helps to separate the "wheat from the chaff" and generally speeds up the search for information.
It is worth noting that the privacy policy of each corporation that collects this or that data about its customers indicates all the information that the user allows to store when confirming the conditions; if such an agreement seems unacceptable, there is always the opportunity to reject the terms of use.
An example of unauthorized access to users' personal information is the case of the social network Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg's company experimented with the emotional state of users
In 2014, the company set up an experiment to influence the emotional state of people by filtering positive and negative posts in the feed without notifying its users.
This incident had a negative impact on the image of the corporation itself: the company had to create an internal commission on ethical and legal issues of experiments, and retraining of personnel in this area was also carried out.
In general, we can say that there is nothing in the collection of personal data that could harm the average user: for the most part, this process is carried out to improve the quality of the services provided. So it's too early to talk about "Big Brother".
