A couple of months ago, a veteran investor in Silicon Valley conducted an experiment: he extracted all the data that Facebook and Google each held about him and compared the files.
The results startled him — Google held dramatically more information, by a large multiple. “It’s amazing,” he told me over breakfast in San Francisco. “Why is nobody talking about that?”
It is an interesting question, particularly if you use Google’s services numerous times each day, as I do. One answer might be that Google executives have been savvy in building political support networks. Another is that Google hangs on to the data it collects itself, and then uses it to create targeted search-and-advertising offerings, customised for users. Facebook lets third-party developers access its data, which is why the antics of Cambridge Analytica have sparked so much furore.