Cambridge Analytica probably knows us just as well as some of our friends. The company was able to map our personality traits based on what we liked on Facebook and the other data on our social media pages. The amount and types of data Cambridge Analytica gathered must be very detailed, because even an everyday blogger can gather a lot of info on their blog’s viewers. Here are the types of info that I have gathered through Google Analytics on anyone who has visited this site. Google Analytics is free and available to anyone who creates a website.
Your home page on Google Analytics starts with an overview of the amount of users who viewed your site, the date they viewed your site, and how they found your site: social media, google search, direct website, or other.
Next, the audience page shows you the city where the user is located, language, browser, and service provider.
User City
User Language
User Browser
User Service Provider
Third, you can see the users’ gender, age, and interests. Google Analytics explains here how they gather users’ interests data:
“By enabling the Advertising Features, you enable Google Analytics to collect data about your traffic via Google advertising cookies and identifiers, in addition to data collected through a standard Google Analytics implementation. Regardless of how you send data to Google Analytics (for example, via the Google Analytics tracking code, Google Analytics SDK, or the Measurement Protocol), if you use Google Advertising Features, you must adhere to this policy.”
User Gender
User Age
All of this data can be gathered just by creating a blog and a user name on Google Analytics. None of the user on this page have expressly agreed to provide any of their information. They have only visited the site. Google Analytics describes their service as an advertising targeting tool. However, the use of the data collected is not necessarily restricted to just finding users who might like a vegetarian burger, for example. In cases like Cambridge Analytica, it can get a little scary.
