Have you ever googled something that you’d never say out loud? Have you ever searched online for embarrassing information or deeply personal questions that you’d never ask another person? Have you ever explored a topic online that you’d never admit to in real life?

If you want to know who someone really is – if you want to know who you really are – examine online activities, behaviours, and habits.

We are producing, giving, sharing, and leaving behind massive amounts of personal data online that reveal more honest reflections of who we really are, instead of who we believe or pretend to be in real life.

Indeed, much can be learned about people’s online revelations that is different from what they say or do in real life. When we have an intimate question, seek sensitive information, explore desires, or indulge a habit, many of us turn to computers to fulfill our needs.

In Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, argues that the online world serves as a digital truth serum where, through our own online activities, behaviours, and habits, we reveal our true beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, and interests.

After mining and examining the information we search for, generate, share, and leave behind online, Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that one could develop more reliable and real-time information about what people are thinking than by traditional data-gathering methods through polls or surveys.

He observes that “people are really, really honest on Google” and when “alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media; they even tell Google things they don’t tell anybody else. Google offers digital truth serum. The words we type there are more honest than the pictures we present on Facebook or Instagram”.

In other words, people search for answers to questions they won’t ask or tell to anyone else.

Stephens-Davidowitz says: “Look at Google searches and you can find something new and interesting and surprising that we didn’t know. Whether it’s hatred or abortion or child abuse or political views or pregnancy or anxiety or depression.”

His analysis of this online data, especially from Google searches, uncovers some surprising things about people. For example, the data unearths many parents’ implicit gender bias of their children.

Parents often believe that they treat their daughters and sons equally and are equally concerned about their overall well-being. But the aggregate of their online searches and information-seeking behaviours reveals large differences in their views of their daughters and sons.

There are more Google searches for “is my son gifted” or “is my son a genius” than for girls; meanwhile, there are more searches for “is my daughter overweight” or “is my daughter ugly” than for boys.

Our online activities, behaviours and habits reveal things about us that we not only wouldn’t say or admit to in person but we also may not realise about ourselves

It appears that parents, whether aware of it or not, are more excited about the intellectualism of sons and more concerned about the physical appearance of daughters.

As another example, most people claim they aren’t interested in porn. But according to Pornhub’s aggregated data from 2015 alone, viewers watched 2.5 billion hours of porn (apparently longer than the entire time of humanity’s known existence).

Some further examples of what all this online data shows includes people’s political preferences, racial and ethnic biases, sexual desires, sexual orientations, health issues, and so on. Stephens-Davidowitz states how “the revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them”. The data from our online activities, behaviours, and habits, in other words, reveals things about us that we not only wouldn’t say or admit to in person but we also may not realise about ourselves. It appears that this data understands us better than we do.

For Stephens-Davidowitz, online data is “the most important data set ever collected on the human psyche”. It requires a new approach to information. The more impersonal the conditions the more honest people tend to be.

He explains that “for eliciting truthful answers, internet surveys are better than phone surveys, which are better than in-person surveys. People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting”.

Online information practices, however, are more private and anonymous and the resulting data leaves volumes of more complete and honest information about us, including intimate information previously unknown.

Further, search engines like Google show where different terms are searched, what place they’re searched more often, how many people are searching for them, when they are searched, how they are searched over time, with what other terms are they combined, and so on.

Or, put differently, one can learn much more about what information people search for, share, and use online than what they present or state in real life.

This revealing personal data is recorded, quantified, sorted, and analysed by corporations and governments. It can give them more power over consumers and citizens. Stephens-Davidowitz cautions that “businesses may almost become too powerful, and really be able to squeeze consumers for everything they’re worth, because they know more about consumers than consumers know about themselves”.

Companies could also use this revealing data to take advantage of people. He describes, for example, how companies can predict your loan payments based on the words you use in your loan application.

“If you use the word ‘God’ in a loan request, you’re 2.2 times more likely to default, 2.2 times more likely not to pay it back. So a company could save money by not giving loans to people who end their requests with ‘God bless you’, which is pretty scary.”

But perhaps it can be comforting to know that one is not alone in their embarrassing or weird interests, desires, fears, or insecurities. Google searches, after all, reveal that we are all weird.

Indeed, when we have deeply personal and private questions to ask, we turn to online resources, especially search engines. Google was originally invented to help people learn more about the world but, ironically, it increasingly serves a simultaneous purpose helping researchers learn more about people. As Stephen-Davidowitz states, “it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the Internet are tremendously revealing”.

Marc Kosciejew is a lecturer and former head of Department of Library, Information, and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta.