What I Did For Love

Kiss my privacy goodbye and point me toward Google. I did what I had to do to get the best results on the Internet. Siva Vaidhyanathan's book, The Googlization of Everything, talks about how we give our privacy away to Google without necessarily realizing it. Google offers many free services like Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube, catching us off guard."In return, Google gets information about our habits and predilections so that it can more efficiently target advertisements at us...It stores 'cookies' in our web-browsers to track our clicks and our curiosities." This means that our privacy really isn't safe and can even be sold to outside third parties, sometimes even without our knowledge or consent. We're sucked in to believe that everything is great and we have all this free access to websites and we can search Google all we want no strings attached but that really isn't true at all.
This is a screen cap of YouTube's suggestion page for my channel and own personal viewing. This could not exist if Google did not store my history of video searches and videos I've watched. It takes all my history an viewing information and puts together a page of videos it thinks I'd enjoy watching and as it happens, I would watch all the videos listed in this screen cap. Although it's a little discomforting to think that Google has the ability to take my information and use it however it pleases, I wouldn't be able to find so many videos that interest me without Google taking the information of what I have watched.

The truth is, it's a sacrifice we have to make to get what we want out of the Internet. If Google didn't track our history and information, we'd never deal with ads that served any interest to us and finding videos that were appealing to us would be much more difficult. And what many people may not know, Google searches would be much less reliable. Returning to Vaidhyanathan's book, he writes "If you do not allow Google to track your moves, you get less precise results to queries that would lead you to local restaurants and shops or sites catering to your interests." There is an option to change privacy settings on Google so that it won't track your history and cookies are disabled, but then results are very unstable and Google would fail to deliver web results that would normally be relevant to the intention of the user. And besides, even if we did keep our privacy settings strictly private, other public services like telephones and doctors would have that information and they would be giving that information out anyway, so in my opinion, why not let one more website take your information to give you the best results possible?