Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google !

An April 26, 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal asks: Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google !  

Recent controversy over Facebook Inc.’s hunger for personal data has surfaced the notion that the online advertising industry could be hazardous to our privacy and well-being. As justifiable as the focus on Facebook has been, though, it isn’t the full picture. If the concern is that companies might be collecting some personal data without our knowledge or explicit consent, Alphabet Inc.’s Google is a far bigger threat by many measures... Google's data-gathering empire is bigger and more pervasive than Facebook's - and while it hasn't been plagued by scandal, it can't evade scrutiny forever.

In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its massive trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts.

Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we've installed, demographics like age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we've shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn't use information from "sensitive categories" such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health. Because it relies on cross-device tracking, it can spot logged-in users no matter which device they're on. Google fuels even more data harvesting through its dominant ad marketplaces. There are up to 4,000 data brokers in the U.S., and collectively they know everything about us we might otherwise prefer they didn't -- whether we're pregnant, divorced or trying to lose weight. Google works with some of these brokers directly but the company says it vets them to prevent targeting based on sensitive information. Google also is the biggest enabler of data harvesting, through the world's two billion active Android mobile devices.