caitlynz98
My longest standing gmail account is the one I made in 2010. I set it up on my parent’s clunky desktop computer. The monitor was a giant cube, its depth unimaginable by today's standards, the screen a bulbous rounded surface. It wasn’t my first email. There had been an AOL account before it and a different gmail account with a childhood nickname that at the mature age of eleven I felt I had outgrown, so I made my new grownup email address, caitlynz98. I was still at an age where the importance of internet anonymity was drilled into my brain right alongside not talking to strangers. Now, caitlynz98 is mainly my spam email. Having existed for so long, it's linked to Google's ever growing list of services that I have knowingly and unknowingly used over the years.
Google data. All folders.
Google divides up my data by service. Represented in the folder names are services Google has discontinued, like Hangout, and services I hadn’t even realized were owned by Google, like Blogger. A good portion of the folders are empty or contain blank files. Eleven-year-old me didn’t exactly have a disposable income, so folders like Shopping and Workspace Marketplace are void of data. I was using this account well before I even had a cellphone so my location data is sparse.
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Search History
I know I shouldn’t be surprised that Google has kept my search history. Under My Activity, I find a log of Google searches and site visits between the years 2010 and 2013. For all the times I’d deleted my internet history and all the devices I’ve gone through since making the account, Google has preserved every search I've conducted while logged in. In the three year period represented here, Google saved 1,471 searches.
Like with my Facebook data, I can fill in some of the context for my searches: October 2010, I was clearly on the American Revolution chapter of my seventh grade history book.
There are some searches that I imagine are from the span of time when everyone in my family was sharing one laptop. Whenever I'd forget to log out of my account, my other family members were browsing the internet as caitlynz98.
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Google has no way to know that the search for the New York state bar directory, the search for realtor.com listings in Oakland county, Michigan, and the search an answer on the existence of pink dolphins were all conducted by separate human beings.
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caitlynz98 is a singular identity that is interested in New York attorneys, Michigan real estate, and marine life all at once.
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There's also plenty of search entries I can't begin to come up with an explanation for. Data doesn't preserve context.
Ads
Google also provides a list of the ads I've seen and clicked on through Google searches, but the information about the ads I viewed is minimal.
My Google data mostly consists of logs of dates and times events occured but very little context about the event itself. The most informative data in my Google download to me is my search history. I'm able to discern a lot about what I was looking for and even who conducted the search just by reading the query. In logs like ads I've viewed, there's no way to recover or even guess the context or content of what I viewed.
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Ad Personalization
While there's no inferences in Google's data download, they're available for viewing online in Google's ad settings:
Google ad interests for caitlynz98 on November 21, 2020.
I learn more about the identity Google has constructed for me through their inferences than through the data itself. The same way I can look at my Google search log and remember the context for the searches, Google can apply their own context to my searches. This lists of my ad interests changes on a daily basis. For example, Auto & Vehicles normally wouldn't be on the list, but at the time of taking this screenshot, I had been looking for a place to take my car for an oil change. Some days, Google can't approximate my gender, but on this day, my internet searches fit Google's definition of female.
The above list from November 21, 2020 on my caitlynz98 Google account had little in common with the lists of my ad interests less than a month later on December 14, 2020 from my school Google account:
Google ad interests for my school account on December 14, 2020.
As my final semester of college is coming to an end, an interest in "Academic Conferences & Publications" has been added as I scramble to study for exams and write final papers. My age range has increased by ten years, from 18-24 to 18-34. While the end of the semester is stressful, I would say it hasn't aged me that much, but for Google's ad purposes, it has. Data identity is fluid and unstable. For Google, it's so they can place the right ad at the right time in order to optimize its effectiveness. For me, I primarily understand it as a categorization of the nature of my Google searches.