Google is perceived by many people as a provider of useful, supposedly free tools. In reality, every user pays with their data and becomes a manipulable advertising victim. This data is often collected without any legal basis. Even the lives of people who supposedly have nothing to hide are made transparent to advertising platforms and intelligence services. Some online marketers have been educated by Google to become completely dependent and often no longer have their full capacity to think.
Real-time advertising: Real-time bidding
Google collects an extremely large amount of data from users who use Google products. Google evaluates location data, click behavior, preferences, likes and much more.
Google rewards itself with these data by selling Google Ads as an advertising platform. This happens among other things through Google Ads as a marketing platform. Google allows data brokers to supply user data and delivers user data to data brokers itself, often in real-time. Even auctions take place in your browser in real-time. In this process, advertisers negotiate for an ad space on your device. For this, they receive numerous information about you and your behavior that were previously collected by Google among other things. The advertiser who best matches their advertising effort with your data and is worth the most gives the highest bid to influence you. This whole thing is called Real-Time Bidding or RTB.
RTB uses what is known as cookie matching. Cookie matching compares the data on a user, including you, between all the advertising platforms served by Google. Each advertising platform lists you as an advertising victim under a different unique identifier. These different identifiers for the same user are standardized by cookie matching. This way, Google knows that the Google user 471112131415 is the same as the Criteo user 08151617181920. This is convenient for Google, Criteo and other companies that earn money with your data, and bad for you as an advertising victim. It makes you more predictable and easier to influence and track on the Internet. This is why secret services also like to use Google if they believe that a user 1920212222324 could be a criminal. Thanks to the user's naive use of Google services, they can then find out where the user in question was, when and for how long, what they did there (what they ate, surfed an adult site, sent an email to a friend with content X, etc.) and where they then went, drove to, cycled to or took the train.
Google has lost control over user data, so says a source, which also names Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Currently (early 2025) there is a lawsuit against Google for this data trade.
Alternatives: Sustainable advertising with depth. If everyone who uses real-time bidding were successful, then "everyone" would be successful.
Google Ads
Poor quality. Deceiving the market
Google pretends that Google Ads are the savior. Many marketing people believe it or want to believe it because they earn easy money by pressing buttons to place Google Ads ads for clients.
Anyone who has ever taken a closer look at Google Ads will have realized for themselves that appearances are more rusty than shiny. Google has exactly one goal: to generate more revenue itself. This works better if the ads are not as successful. Because then more ads have to be placed.
A background report highlights among other things how poorly the target audience segments are that Google uses for its advertising platform. There, one and the same person is listed once as a man and once as a woman. What may occasionally be true in Germany today does not hold globally at least.
Our own experience shows that Google Ads convert better at the start of a campaign than after a few weeks of running. The reason is probably (at least) that Google initially grants the advertiser a standard quality factor. In reality, this quality factor is often lower than the (high) standard. As a result, Google Ads becomes increasingly unattractive for many advertisers over time. The Google Ads settings also tend to be preset in such a way that the advantage lies with Google and not with the advertiser. Google also manipulates search results in order to sell more ads (see below). The search results were deliberately made worse. This is currently also the subject of investigations in the USA, including under antitrust law.
Google is also very active in lobbying and ensuring that political and corporate decision-makers like Google.
If you still like Google, take a look at the following information and also watch the documentary The Billion Dollar Code. It's best to ask the German company ART+COM from Berlin what they think of Google.
Data supplier to the NSA
The NSA uses Google Ads Cookies, to destroy the anonymity of the Tor-Browser. Thus the NSA can track users very effectively in the Tor-network, thanks to Google. Further techniques, such as the hijacking of Tor-relay nodes allow the NSA to track people even better.
If a user logs on to a website, for example with an email address, then this email address can be used by the NSA, depending on the case, to identify the person even better or even uniquely.
This realization is already very old. So far, nobody seems to have been bothered by it. Data protection authorities in particular do not appear to be willing or able to tackle the "Google" problem.
Alternatives: See above, Real-Time Bidding
Android / Google Chrome
Hackers could steal Android users' login data via Google Chrome. The reason is a security flaw in Google Chrome. This was reported at the end of July 2024. Similarly, this was possible with the Apple Safari browser and iOS.
The method was also used by Russian hackers. It is striking that these hackers used the same tools for their attack as official security companies (previously recognized as trustworthy).
Alternatives: Fairphone, anderes Android-System ohne Google (Graphene OS o.ä.), andere Browser (Firefox, Brave…)
Google Gemini (AI)
Users of Google Drive report that Google accesses and evaluates user documents without consent using its AI system Gemini, specifically a user received an unsolicited summary of their tax documents uploaded to Google Drive, despite not wanting it. This was reported on June 14, 2024 .
Alternatives: Numerous available. For corporate applications, more sustainable better and cheaper results are possible than with Gemini.
Google Narnia 2.0
Google links users' account information with its advertising network without this being apparent.
A recently uncovered internal document from a 2017 US Google antitrust case contains many details about this project, internally referred to as "Narnia 2" or "Narnia 2.0". Source: Google Document
The document explains how "Narnia 2" enabled Google to "tap into data across all Google properties and combine interest data such as general location history or web history with intent data such as search queries, website and store visits to create a holistic, detailed user profile". This code name "Narnia 2" was not publicly known prior to this lawsuit, but it is all over the documents.
Back in 2016, I took note of this privacy policy change and knew it was important, but I didn't realize how extensive it actually was. The old sentence read:
We do not combine DoubleClick cookie information with your personal data unless we have your consent
which was replaced by:
Depending on your account settings, your activities on other websites and in other applications may be linked to your personal data in order to improve Google services and the ads served by Google.
Google has violated its policy NOT to combine DoubleClick ad tracking data with account data. According to the document, by 2016, 500 million Google users "consented" to the "Narnia 2" project, and by 2017, 1.5 billion "consented" (or were supposed to) – by clicking "I accept" in Google's new privacy policy.
Google considered the "Narnia 2" project to be "arguably the most significant change to Google's consent and policies", as the document states. I assume that almost no one was aware of what the change in that single sentence really meant, or even noticed the change. How could anyone give their "consent" to this in full knowledge of the facts? A gigantic deception.
Not only did Google mislead consumers in 2016, but it also misled regulators in Europe, the U.S. and other regions who approved Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in 2008 after Google told them it would not be able to merge DoubleClick ad tracking with Google account data.
Alternatives: Google girls (or gloss over Google).
Google Chrome Browser
Researchers have investigated the strategic importance of the Chrome browser in paper Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox. For Google, Chrome is war-decisive because the browser allows it to access user data to an extreme degree and analyze user behavior deeply.
The goal for Google is to sell as much personalized advertising as possible and, if someone pays for it, also to manipulate elections.
Alternatives: Firefox, Brave, Tor, DuckDuckGo, countless others
Google Search
Evil tricks of the search engine. So the conclusion of the reporting from July 11, 2024 and a judgment by the Higher Regional Court Cologne (Case No. 15 U 60/23).
Google manipulates its search results to sell more advertising in its search results. To this end intentionally worsens Google's search results. Whoever still likes Google should find themselves another doctor. ([1])
Alternatives: Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, viele andere
Appetite for data
The French data protection authority has ordered Google a fine of 250 million euros because Google trained its AI with unlawfully obtained data. Specifically, it's about repeated disregard and infringement of copyright law.
See also Cambridge Analytica in the Meta article. Meta and Google collaborated with Donald Trump to influence millions of Americans to vote for the "right" president, using a million-dollar-per-day ad campaign as a bomb.
The US Department of Justice has sued Google on numerous charges. The charge: Google has continuously engaged in unlawful behavior.
- Increasing advertising space at the expense of the organic results that users are actually searching for.
- Ads are made more similar to organic results.
- Manipulated auctions to increase ad prices (CPS doubled within 10 years).
- Suboptimal classification of ads to increase advertising revenue.
- Reduced transparency for advertisers so that they (also) bid for poorly matching keywords.
Alternatives: Google girls or gloss over Google.
Unsichere Datenplattform
Data held by and with Google can potentially be read and evaluated by American intelligence agencies. This results already from the American surveillance laws (Cloud Act, FISA 702, EO12333). Google has admitted it itself in its transparency report.
Good for all those who have nothing to hide. These people certainly can't be manipulated either. They apparently have a very boring life without a debit card, credit card or sex and are so strong-willed that nothing and nobody can influence them. Congratulations and our condolences! The name of this disease is not known; it is certainly not normal.
See also the Sins of Meta for further cases that affect not only Google but other companies that consider users' privacy good enough to exploit.
Alternatives: See above: Avoid Google whenever possible.
Key messages of this article
Google collects and links data from users via various services in order to create a detailed user profile without the users being properly informed or being able to give their proper consent.
Google manipulates its products to sell more advertising and use user data for its own purposes.
My name is Klaus Meffert. I have a doctorate in computer science and have been working professionally and practically with information technology for over 30 years. I also work as an expert in IT & data protection. I achieve my results by looking at technology and law. This seems absolutely essential to me when it comes to digital data protection. My company, IT Logic GmbH, also offers consulting and development of optimized and secure AI solutions.
