What’s Still Private?
After reading the three articles I was surprised to realize just how numbed I have become to ad targeting and the accumulation of my personal inforamtion. In Ehtan Zuckerman’s “The Internet’s Original Sin” Zuckerman states, “Users have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change” (Zuckerman). This line struck me because I realized I too was a part of this group that was not really bothered, I truly was “trained” to accept that, “everything [I] say and do online will be aggregated into profiles” (Zuckerman). Even after reading this article I was not alarmed by the amount of information companies have been able to gather about me, probably because I have been “trained” and have grown so accustomed to it.
It was only after reading “Facebook terms and conditions: Why you don’t own your online life” that I realized just how much access these companies have. I had never really been exposed to the terms and conditions, like many other users I blindly accept them, and seeing the hard facts of what these companies could access was extremely alarming. As I continued to read the article I started paying more attention to the ads that were being shown on the sides of the article. I was surprised to find an ad for a charity walk that I had signed up for an hour before accessing the article. This put everything into reality and gave me an even greater understanding of the scope of targeting.
I was alarmed after reading the articles, but I am not in fear of using the internet. I can still appreciate just how well this strategy works. Many of the articles claimed the the ads on social media don’t work because people are going on websites like facebook to connect, not to shop and google ads work better. However, people go on Facebook a lot of the time to procrastinate, and ads that come up that match your interest are catchy when mindlessly browsing on Facebook. I for one have discovered some of my favorite clothing stores through facebook ads, and after reading these articles I understand why most of my facebook ads are for clothing stores of similar styles and price ranges, they also happen to be the same stores my facebook friends browse online and shop from. These articles were particularly interesting to me because I could immediately observe the subject matter they were discussing.
I also began to realize now the function of incognito mode that google chrome provides, but it made me wonder how private this function really is and if google is able to keep tabs on it or what the terms and conditions of this function truly are.
