Dylan Curran Profile picture
Mar 24, 2018 41 tweets 13 min read Read on X
Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it
1. google.com/maps/timeline?… Google stores your location (if you have it turned on) every time you turn on your phone, and you can see a timeline from the first day you started using Google on your phone
2. This is every place I have been in the last twelve months in Ireland, going in so far as the time of day I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one
3. myactivity.google.com/myactivity Google stores search history across all your devices on a separate database, so even if you delete your search history and phone history, Google STILL stores everything until you go in and delete everything, and you have to do this on all devices
4. google.com/settings/ads/ Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lbs in one day?) and income
5. Google stores information on every app and extension you use, how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with (who do you talk to on facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep at) security.google.com/settings/secur…
6. youtube.com/feed/history/s… Google stores ALL of your YouTube history, so they know whether you're going to be a parent soon, if you're a conservative, if you're a progressive, if you're Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you're feeling depressed or suicidal, if you're anorexic...
7. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you, I've requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 3 MILLION Word documents google.com/takeout
8. google.com/takeout This link includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you've taken on your phone, the businesses you've bought from, the products you've bought through Google...
9. Your calendar, your Google hangout sessions, your location history, the music you listen to, the Google books you've purchased, the Google groups you're in, the websites you've created, the phones you've owned, the pages you've shared, how many steps you walk in a day...
10. Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information, mine was roughly 600mb, which is roughly 400,000 Word documents
11. This includes every message you've ever sent or been sent, every file you've ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you've ever sent or been sent
12. Facebook also stores what it think you might be interested in based off the things you've liked and what you and your friends talk about (I apparently like the topic 'Girl')
13. Somewhat pointlessly, they also store all the stickers you've ever sent on Facebook (I have no idea why they do this, it's just a joke at this stage)
14. They also store every time you log into Facebook, where you logged in from, what time, and from what device
15. And they store all the applications you've ever had connected to your Facebook account, so they can guess I'm interested in politics and web and graphic design, that I was single between X and Y period with the installation of Tinder, and I got a HTC phone in November...
16. Side-note, if you have Windows 10 installed, this is a picture of JUST the privacy options with 16 different sub-menus, which have all of the options enabled by default when you install Windows 10
17. This includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your e-mails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive...
18. The files you download, the games you play, your photos and videos, your music, your search history, your browsing history, even what RADIO stations you listen to
19. This is one of the craziest things about the modern age, we would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us, but we just went ahead and did it ourselves because fuck it I want to watch cute dog videos
20. I got the Google Takeout document with all my information, and this is a breakdown of all the different ways they get your information
21. Here's the search history document, which has 90,000 different entries, even showing the images I downloaded and the websites I accessed (I showed ThePirateBay section to show much damage this information can do)
22. Here's my Google Calendar broken down, showing all the events I've ever added, whether I actually attended them, and what time I attended them at (this part is what I went for an interview for a Marketing job, and what time I arrived at)
23. This is my Google Drive, which includes files I EXPLICITLY deleted including my resume, my monthly budget, and all the code, files, and websites I've ever made, and even my PGP private key, which I deleted, which I use to encrypt e-mails
24. This is my Google Fit, which shows all of the steps I've ever taken, any time I walked anywhere, and all the times I've recorded any meditation/yoga/workouts I've done (I deleted this information and revoked Google Fit's permissions)
25. This is all the photos ever taken with my phone, broken down by year, and includes metadata of when and where I took the photos
26. Every e-mail I've ever sent, that's been sent to me, including the ones I deleted or were categorised as spam
27. And now my Google Activity, this has thousands of files, so I'll just do a short summary of what they have
28. Firstly every Google Ad I've ever viewed or clicked on, every app I've ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I've ever visited and what time I did it at, and every app I've ever installed or searched for
29. Every image I've ever searched for and saved, every location I've ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I've ever searched for or read, and EVERY SINGLE google search I've made since 2009
30. And then finally, every YouTube video I've ever searched for or viewed, since 2008
31. I'm probably on an FBI watch-list now, so if I die in the next few months IT WASN'T AN ACCIDENT, IT WAS A SET-UP
32. This information has millions of nefarious uses and violates multiple human rights, you're not a terrorist? Then how come you were googling ISIS? Work at Google and you're suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last ten years
33. Manage to gain access to someone's Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last ten years
34. For anyone who wants to view this or share this off Twitter, here's a link with the entire thread in a blog post threadreaderapp.com/thread/9775599…
35. I have also taken a few days off work to partake in any interviews, podcasts, or radio shows that people may want me to do to spread information awareness
36. I'm hoping to start making podcasts/videos to raise awareness, and touch on some more interesting topics like webcam hacking, major account vulnerabilities, and the threat of future tech. Since I can't dedicate myself full-time, I'd love if anyone who can help gets in touch.
37. I would really appreciate it if you could help me out, patreon.com/iamdylancurran, I will keep doing what I'm doing and help as many people as I can irregardless of what happens. But if I can dedicate myself to this full-time, we can definitely progress with change.
38. Here's my first video, showing what the Google privacy settings mean, and how you can change them
39. The last week has been incredible, right now is the best time to make change happen. As you guys can see, I need recording equipment to produce high-quality videos - a few donations would go a long way towards helping me
gofundme.com/dylan-curran-m…
40. Does Internet Privacy really exist?

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More from @iamdylancurran

Oct 3, 2021
dunno if anyone else does this but I made an agreement with some spiders by the door to my house. the deal was: they catch all the bugs as they come into my house, but under no circumstances were they allowed upstairs. in return, I wouldn't murder them or disturb their webs
this relationship flourished at first. I noticed plenty of dead bug bodies in their webs, and I hadn't seen a spider upstairs in weeks. the spiders just chilled in their webs, never moving an inch. I even greeted them as I entered and exited the house
this all changed one day. I walked into my office upstairs and lo and behold, there was a spider on the wall. I was enraged, they had violated the sovereignty of our agreement in their avarice for more bugs. I killed the upstairs spider with my shoe, and picked up our hoover
Read 6 tweets
Apr 9, 2020
I'm building a security solution that's gonna be a miracle for developers who want to have Enterprise-level security without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's called Sindle, and you can get on the early access list by subscribing on our site:
sindle.io
It's a fantastic alternative to the likes of Sqreen, AlertLogic and Splunk. We're making the user experience incredibly simple, so easy in fact that we're confident anyone can use it, not just security analysts
As an addendum to the ease of use, users will be able to write their own rules. As an example, you can block non-organizational users from an admin panel, or flag users who made more than one purchase in an hour: with a single line of code.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 11, 2019
I wasn't able to get this section in to my article in the Guardian, theguardian.com/commentisfree/…, but here's a list of hopefully China-free alternatives to any Blizzard games if you're looking to play something else. #BoycottBlizzard
Read 5 tweets
Sep 19, 2019
Black or brownface is definitely in the top 3 for ways to cancel yourself
It's kind of strange, there was definitely a lot of brown/blackface in the 90s and early 2000s. Was it more acceptable then or was there just no social media so cancelling people was more difficult? Maybe as there was no social media many people just didn't know it was bad.
So I don't know, I would be torn on this. It seems like your intention doesn't matter at all, or the environment at the time. The list of things I learned from Twitter that I shouldn't say or do is much longer than it was even 10 years ago.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 13, 2019
Worst thing about leaving cert results is the 1% of people who screw up school/college and still end up successful just use the day as an opportunity to do some serious humblebragging
Now I did screw up school/college and end up doing very well for myself, however I attribute 80-90% of that to pure luck and had several horrible, draining years where I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do without proper qualifications.
With a good degree and good results I could have achieved the same thing (maybe better) without having a major early-life crisis which I wouldn't recommend to anyone...
Read 4 tweets
May 24, 2019
It's a disgrace the government has zero plans on the legalization of even the most safe, risk-free recreational drug. That lobby organizations exist to campaign against this based off of rare side effects normally induced by a combination with alcohol.

thejournal.ie/legalising-can…
Where's the lobbying to outlaw alcohol? Alcohol can be linked to ~2.8 million deaths each year, 40% of all violent crimes are linked to alcohol, offenders are far more likely to be under the influence of alcohol than any other drug.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Read 4 tweets

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