[alert type=red ]If you use Google products, and I know you do, then Google knows you better than your mother and spouse does.[/alert]

Google is a technology giant that very early realized the fact, “Information equals Power”.

It tries to collect information about other companies, countless trends, and primarily information about its users. [highlight ]Google is just like an octopus, whose arms want to stretch out everywhere.[/highlight] It has mixed up so much in most aspects of our virtual lives that it is getting an ample amount of information about our actions, locations, behavior and affiliations online.

[highlight ]If you use Google search, YouTube, Picassa, Maps, Gmail, or any of Google’s other free products, then the company stores a bundle of data about you.[/highlight]

 Methods Google uses to get Data

     Let’s have a glance at how Google is gathering information from you :

• Click Tracking – Google logs all the navigational clicks (ads, actions, feature clicks, etc.) of all of its users on all of its services.

• Cookies – Google uses cookies on all of its web properties. In addition, it generates and leaves advertising cookies to track user’s movement around the web.

• Javascript – Google has small amounts of javascript embedded in websites all over the internet. When a user’s browser enforces the script in the background, Google gets a lot of important information on a person’s browsing habits (operating system, location, browser type etc.).

• Forms – Along with the data the user enters into the forms (username, password, etc.), Google also logs the date and time and location of submission.

• Web Beacons – Google embeds small transparent GIFs into many of its checkout screens. When the user downloads the invisible image it sends information about the user’s computer to Google server.

What specific User Data Google collects?

Below is a list of pieces of datum that Google collects when a user interacts with its many web services. However, Google is gathering even more information than most of us realize.

•  Your Searches – Google tracks all your past searches for all devices where you’re registered with your Google account. Now with search becoming more and more personalized, this information is bound to grow and to be more detailed and user specific.

• Your emails – When you use Gmail, Google stores a copy of everything you send and receive on its servers.  Google also scans your mail to send you ads. And not just text, it scans images too.

• Your choice of videos – The world’s largest and most popular video site by far, is owned by Google. It provides Google a huge amount of information about its users’ viewing habits.

• Your Ad preferences – Adwords and Adsense provide Google with a lot of invaluable data like which ads are people clicking on, which site has more traffic, which keywords are advertisers tendering on, and which ones are worth the most? All of this is handy information.

• Your personal information – Google collects your personal information from Google+ account and other sources.

• Your Contacts – It knows your contact list in your phone with all the information you may have included about yourself and the people you know. Also, your contacts in Google Talk, Google+, Gmail, etc.

•  Your tweets – Google has direct access to all your tweets that pass through Twitter.

• Your Documents – Any documents you save on their drive servers remain available to them. You may own your google drive files, although Google can still read them.

• Your Location – Google tracks you everywhere you go with your Android device. So they have all information about the places you visit and also it knows about your current location.

• Your Voice –  It’s very cool to say “OK Google” and have your phone answer any number of questions and obey commands. But by default, Google saves a recording of everything you say.

• Your Financial Details – If you use Google checkout, then Google stores all the financial and personal information about the buyer and even the sellers.

• Your Photos – If you have linked your device with Picassa, then Google stores all your photos in their servers

And the list could go on since there are even more Google products in the market, but we think that by now you’ve gotten the tenor of it.

Taken as whole, if you use Google services, Google will know what you’re searching for, what places you visit, what websites you surf, what news and blog posts you read, your voice, and more.

What Google does with the Data?

With all this vast and personal information at its fingertips, Google uses this data for a wide array of profitable and useful things. In numerous fields where Google is engaged, it can make market decisions, refine its products, research and much more, with the help of this collected data.

So what specifically is Google doing with all of your data?

• Store – It combines all our personal information across its all services and stores it in an internal database called BigTable, spread over approximately one million servers.

• Sharing – It may share our some data with other companies, in exchange of other information or even money.

• Data Analyser – Google uses many complicated spam filters, pattern detection algorithms, image recognition software, natural language interpreters, duplicate content filters, and loads of other complicated softwares to analyze, sort and oragnize our whole data.

• Advertising – You can’t forget that Google earns much of its revenues from advertising. The more Google knows about you, the more efficiently it will be able to serve ads to you, which has a direct denouement on Google’s bottom line.

[alert type=red ]There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.[/alert]

You must have wondered why most of all the services that Google provides are free of cost? Well, now you know. [highlight ]You may not be paying Google with dollars, but you are paying with your personal information.[/highlight]

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve to check up my mails with Gmail, catch up on my blog reading with Google Reader, listen to some music on Google Music, plug next week’s schedule into my Google Calendar, and then watch a few of my favorite videos on YouTube.