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This time we present an article written in cooperation with the French weblog about intelligence and defence Zone d'Intérêt in which we compare the data collection of Google to intelligence agencies like NSA:


Introduction

Since 1998, Google has grown to become an essential part of the web infrastructure and took an important place in the daily lives of millions. Google offers great products, from search engine to video hosting, blogs and productivity services. Each day, users provide Google, willingly and candidly, with many different kind of personal information, exclusive data and files. Google justifies this data collection for commercial purposes, the selling of targeted ads and the enhancement of its mostly free services.

These terabytes of user data and user generated content would be of tremendous value to any intelligence service. As former director of CIA and NSA Michael Hayden half-jokingly stated at Munk debates: "It covers your text messages, your web history, your searches, every search you’ve ever made! Guess what? That’s Google. That’s not NSA."
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Google's recognition algorithms are precise enough to identify an individual, even with slight changes due to lighting conditions or face expression. In addition, Google recurring pop-ups incite Android users to activate a function which automatically uploads all new photographs taken with their device to Google+ Photos and Google Drive. EXIF data and geotags from each photo are collected too. As another option, Google image search has a "reverse image search" functionality which allows any user to upload an image from his computer and let Google's pattern recognition algorithm find similar images. In the help section of Google's image search, it is stated that "any images or URLs that you upload will be stored by Google".
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