“People’s Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them”

“In some cases, the most intimate questions a person is asking — about health worries, relationship woes, financial hardship — are the ones that set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline.
All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data — a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see…

while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers — online, via phone, and by mail — for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits…

Not only are lenders taking advantage of people in vulnerable financial situations, not only are lead generators sometimes skirting Google’s ad policies and even violating state laws, but companies are sharing individual data in a way that puts consumers directly at risk. All this comes down to the widespread availability and longevity of personal data online…
The effect may be a more pleasant online experience for someone who is perceived to have more income”

People's Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them

I think there would be a lot of value in going back to what it was the Internet was supposed to be, what it was supposed to provide people, and thinking about how that Internet would be designed for 2015. I am constantly reading about all the ways we are dissatisfied by or scared of the Internet. But the solution clearly isn’t to just stop using it: at this point, it’s such an integral part of our lives.

For example, in science research no one reads physical copies of journals anymore, those are practically ornamental. We use specialized search engines to find the research articles we are interested in and then print it out or read it online. And I am kind of super glad that google starts to pick up on the fact that I’m a biologist and knows what I am looking for when I google a gene name.

It feels like a lot of the downsides of these services have to do with who is vulnerable in our society, who can be exploited, who can access the knowledge and resources to protect themselves. And who is seen as a target in our society.

We didn’t design the internet in order to target vulnerable people; it was not built to reinforce inequality. I think it’s time to start clearly re-envisioning what we want the internet for.

Related: The way that Reddit and journalism illustrate the ~failures of our dreams for the interent