I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.
The closest thing is Google’s ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they’ve browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could’ve used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren’t even aware of it.
The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn’t be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the ‘deep web’ for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?
Have them open Google maps if they use it and show them the timeline. That usually freaks people out a bit. Then you can say sites are doing this same tracking with their digital information or something.
I know that long time ago this was one of the things that freaked me out. I went into google account privacy settings and there is a lot of info about you. It really creeps you out when you see info from years ago.