• Question: how much does the internet know

    Asked by fizzster5 to Reka on 8 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      That’s a complicated question. If you’re wondering how much the internet knows about YOU personally, and you use Google Chrome or an Android phone, or any of Google’s products such as YouTube, Gmail, Google (the search engine), Blogger, Google Drive or Google Maps, for example,you could go to http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ to see what Google thinks you like, or are like, based on your browsing history.
      Going here https://www.google.com/maps/timeline will show you the places Google thinks you’ve visited, or where you work and live.
      To find all your search history, you could go here https://www.google.com/history/ .

      If all of this freaks you out a bit and you want to stop Google from collecting data about a bunch of the things you do online, you can manage your privacy settings here: https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard

      Now, if you’re wondering how much information about ANYTHING is on the internet…
      There were 1 billion websites (that’s 1,000,000,000 ) in 2014, and this number will have gotten a lot bigger since then!
      In terms of the amount of data stored on the internet, one estimate is about 5 million TERAbytes! Your average modern computer probably stores about 1 terabyte.

      How much does this all weigh, though? Only about as much as a strawberry! How can this be? Because data is stored using electrons, which weigh a very very very very small amount. Watch this video to learn a bit more about it! https://youtu.be/WaUzu-iksi8

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