How long until Google figures out I'm single?
Background
Most of us are aware of the vast amounts of ongoing data collection by tech companies – Google, Facebook, Apple, to name the obvious. But how many of us make the 3 clicks to browse what is actually collected? Or to download a copy of our records?
This picked my interest recently and a quick look at the Google My Ad Center reveals a variety of basic and more private information, such as my age, spoken languages, all the way to my relationship status, household income and career industry.
The Experiment
So as of June 4th 2023, Google has not recognized my new relationship status. Although putting this post on the Internet poses an interesting confounding factor, I am curious to see how long it will take to be reflected nonetheless.
Method
Using Automa, a browser automation extension for Chrome, I setup a workflow which scrapes my Google Ad Center for my relationship status on a daily basis.
Nice thing about this is that doing it through the browser means I don’t need to reverse-engineer Google’s anti-bot and anti-scraping mechanisms, it just seems as though I am checking it myself.
Trigger
A daily cronjob trigger was defined to go off once daily at 10:10AM (why not?)
10 10 * * *.
Once per day, the workflow is triggered to begin with the opening of a new tab in the background. Heading straight for the Google My Ad Center page, it assumes that my login is cached and works automatically. This may be a point to improve later.
Get
Once the new tab is opened, the element containing my relationship status has its value extracted. The current date and time are also fetched from the worldtimeapi so as to know when the result was obtained.
Log
Once the relevant and up-to-date details are fetched, they are stored in a local database in Automa (the nature of which eludes me, though probably not unlike a sqlite database).
Results
Over time, the date and associated relationship statuses from the Google My Ad Center will collect and it will be possible to see on which day the change occurred.
| date | relationship-status |
|---|---|
| 2023-06-05T10:13:09.450057-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-06T11:57:40.906172-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-07T11:21:21.974805-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-08T10:12:10.724662-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-09T11:57:02.712188-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-10T10:11:02.297644-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-11T10:51:30.187040-03:00 | In a relationship |
| 2023-06-12T10:39:32.436511-03:00 | Single |
Table 1: GoogleAdCenter Database Results – 7 days
