Google’s File on Me Was Huge. Here’s Why It Wasn’t as Creepy as My Facebook Data

Credit: Minh Uong/The New York Times

Google has far more data about us than Facebook. Yet unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, which has been under fire for improperly leaking user data, Google has sidestepped controversy.

You may wonder: Why is that? After all, we turn to Google for not only our internet searches but also for our emails, calendaring, maps, photo uploads, video streaming, mobile phones and web browsers. That’s far more pervasive than the baby photos and comments that we post on Facebook.

To help get an answer, I downloaded a copy of all of the information that Google has on me. Then I compared the trove to all the data that I already knew Facebook had obtained on me.

What I found was that my Google data archive was much larger than my Facebook file — about 12 times larger, in fact — but it was also packed with fewer unpleasant surprises.

New York Times