Privacy Revised

In my previous blog, I talked about privacy online. The blog stated that the Google story that I have chosen to write my post about is called “CONFESSIONS OF A GOOGLE EMPLOYEE”. This story is about Doug Edwards, a former director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google. Edwards has written a book title “I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59” and he is being interviewed based off the information within the book.

                Within the interview, Edward said that the Google Toolbar scared people because of its ability to rank a website that you’ve visited. This means that Google keeps track of the sites that you’ve visited. He also mentioned that the beginning of Gmail also scared people because users believed that Google was reading their Email in order to show them advertisement. He gave another example of Google’s tracking ability when he referred to what happens if you’ve misspelled a word in Google. If you do misspell a word, the computer will ask you if you meant another word or phrase. This can only be done if Google stores your previous searches in its memory. This relates to our classroom discussions because in one of our classroom power point slides, it said that by us signing up to websites, we are giving them information that advertisers can use to try and sell us things, develop products, and track our activity.

What I did not mention is that all search engines operate differently. Most sell top billing to advertisers. Google’s top billing is calculated according to an algorithm based on relevance, popularity, and other factors. When we use these search engines, they automatically share our information and if the process were used by jobs and other organizations, then we would have to monitor every second of our lives. If it affects our lives in a negative way, I believe the law should change.