Google Thought I Was a Man

Back in 2012, Google thought I was a man.

Let me back up. In January of that year, the search giant released a new privacy policy that, for the first time, sought to aggregate your usage data from across its array of products—including Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, and others—into a single profile. This change caused quite a stir, both inside and outside of tech circles, and as a result, users flocked to the “ad preferences” section of their profiles, where Google had listed the categories that a user seemed to be interested in, as inferred from their web usage patterns—like “Computers & Electronics,” or “Parenting.” But in addition to those categories, Google listed the age range and gender it thought you were. It thought I was a man, and somewhere between 35 and