They are spying on your computer privacy, surveillance and search engine
- Raven Kwan
- Sep 8, 2017
- 3 min read
Have you ever think about most of the search result and advertisement are based on what we have browse? These all about datamining, a statistic system to archive our interest and base on it to provide the best advertisement or search result to gain our interests. In fact, almost all the things you do online are monitored by search engines and advertising vendors, who treat you as potential customers, spy on what you are searching for, what sites to visit, and what ads you see. Whether you clicked in or not.
For example, it's like you pick up a magazine or book every time, or where to look at the store. When you look at them, they are looking back at you. Marketers think that “behavioural advertising” based on the browsing history and statistics to depend there advertising category is a good way for marketing in nowadays, because it can be based on audience interest promotion. But the people of advocate protecting privacy think that this “ubiquitous spy” violates the "basic civil liberties." Thus, another disadvantage is that, other people can also get information of you. This morning, I search some key words “car” and “vine”, I prefer to find a short video that I had watched it before, the result did not seem good, so I decide to change those key words to “car”, “vine” and “drift”. And finally got my Initial D vine, after that I had my lunch around 12:00, I started to browse a forum, nearly most of the ads were about cars, just like the photos I captured below. This also happened last month while I tried to search the price of a per of sneaker, after a certain time, most of the ads turned into auction site and show me the price of the sneaker. Moreover, I use Spotify - a music streaming application, everyday, whenever my playlist is ended, the app will still go on and pick the song that I interested every single time. All these make me feel strange at the first time, I bet you do too, just like someone invade or stalk your life in a sudden. Anyone who does not have to invade the place of residence to your desk computer to steal privacy, once you upload personal data to the internet, the information is no longer limited to the location where you live but open in the entire internet. (Hawke, S., 2001, p.81)
Internet is a place of free to share, but also a place that control our information privacy and personal data. On the one hand is the control of our own information privacy, on the other hand is to prevent the technology of others to protect our privacy of information, against depriving us of information private control. An easy way to protect ourselves, is to delete and cancel the cookie function of your device, these may prevent the search engine to gain information of you. Also, you may turn on the private browsing mode, these may automatically delete your cookies everytime. But this may limited your browsing experience, like they will not save your account and password while login anymore.
"Private mode" by Raven Kwan (CC BY 2.0)
Word count: 525
Reference:
Hawke, S., 2001, Computer and Internet Use, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Rosenoer, J.,1996, CyberLaw: The Law of the Internet, Springer Science & Business Media, San Francisco, USA
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