Google Personalized Search
A Rising Issue
Google is and has been collecting your information, and in the piece I read they wrote about their own privacy statement. The things they talk about is that they are collecting your information for your own benefit. They claim that they collect your information to make their services better for you. But they have another reason and that is for profit, as any company is around for, to make money. However, the way Google does it is quite frightening. The way it is scary is because they collect your private information and sell it to companies. This is frightening because all your private information is collected by Google and then sold to some outside company.
Good news is they say that the information can be no way connected to you, but thats up to you to beleive that or not. Even though it can’t happen now, we have to make sure that it never happens. Because if Google allows the information to be traced back to you, your own private information could easily be found by someone and they could possibly use it against you in any way. However as long as Google keeps the information safe, then there is not much we need to worry about.
USERS
In today’s day and age everything is fast paced; any shortcut possible is taken. So when Google asks us if we want that password saved for the next time we log on to a site of course we quickly press yes before continuing on with our day, taking very little regard or ever thinking about that little pop-up on our computer. Unfortunately, as convenient as it is, we should think twice about what information of ours Google is storing away in its massive database. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Google tracks every single thing we do on the web and stores it away, most of the time without proper consent. All of this is what is known as the Google Personalized Search. Making it quicker easier for computer users across the globe to search the web, but is it worth the risk?
Experts
Tim Jordan, the author of Information Politics Liberation and Exploitation of the Digital Society, doesn't agree with what Google is doing. Jordan talks about the process of recursion which is when information can be applied to itself and run it through a process to produce even more information. Jordan explains this by stating when a person searches for something on Google, “…the information is taken and recursed or taken your information, then added it to everyones else information that might be like you, and decided you're interested in the same kind of search.” Which is why ads pop up that are related to what a person has searched in the past. Tim Jordan also references something called “The Cloud”, which is a space that a person can send files up, a way to take large amounts of data up into the cloud or can also take large amounts of data down from The Cloud.
Click Image to learn more about Tim Jordan
While all that is good, flexible, and can make things easier, there is also someone externally running the cloud that can see and use any of the information that goes through The Cloud and the process of recursion can happen again. The question comes about “Why not encrypt the information sent up?”. The answer to that Jordan says is that when a person encrypts information they are automatically a target and looked at as someone that could be dangerous. The government tries to pull as much information as possible and use this process of recursion so they can then use the data to analyze searches. They use the information by searching it to find something like why a person is speaking a different language in a certain country. It is all about national security but how much privacy invasion is too much?
Are You Safe?
Unfortunately for most computer users this doesn’t just affect Google Chrome users, but also Safari and Firefox (Ball 6). Firefox is reported to receive 85 percent of its $163 million annual income from Google in return for providing them with information about what kind of searches its very own users are up to. On the bright side this is not all bad news; one main reason Google teams up with other powerhouses of the industry is to steer people away from harmful websites and places they shouldn’t be going on the internet.
Solutions
Another simple fix or solution we thought of is to show how to to turn off the Google personalized search. While it seeems silly of it to automattically be installed and running, at least there are simple steps to opt out of this feature next time we turn on our computer to surf the web. As this video explains, you can opt out of personalized search while on or off of your own Google account. This video also helps further explain how the personalized search works. From experts.
Because this isnt the most controversial issue, one solution is to simply make sure everyone knows that Google is collecting your information, because if people don’t know about it, then Google could do something bad with the information, and the users would never know. Also we found out that almost 70% of the people surveyed had no clue that Google was collecting their information.
