Are you following me?
Jinfo Blog

By Dale Moore

Abstract

Whenever you use Google your clicks are followed and recommendations are made based on what you've been looking at. Nothing new here, but remember, although it appears free, Google is a business and the trade is your personal information.

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Ever get the feeling you’re being followed? Well you are, says James Ball in the Guardian. Someone's been reading your email.

They know what you've been looking at online. They almost certainly have a photograph of your house. If you've got a smartphone, they even know where you've been and what you'll be doing next week. Well, kind of. 

This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms.

Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you. So writes Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic. 

Using the Mozilla tracking tool Collusion, the author learned that 105 companies had tracked his internet movements during a 36 hour period. I tried the same tool while writing this post and it really is quite amazing how much activity is created by the simple action of clicking from site to site.  

But this is hardly news is it? Google has been collecting data for years and attempting to personalise it. Who hasn’t been shopping for shoes, gadgets or car insurance online only to have lots of ads for similar products appear in the browser.

And it’s not just Google; others such as Apple with its recommendations via iTunes does pretty much the same thing. It’s become the normal, even expected thing. Yet Google seems to be the current most popular target among bloggers, particularly in light of the search giant’s recent "streamlining" of its privacy policies. 

You can of course prevent your movements being tracked by using tools such as TrackerBlock and a myriad of similar offerings. But then, who wants to install yet more software? And anyway, is all of this tracking really such a bad thing? All this putative "business intelligence" feeding yet ever more data into large business databases (contributing to yet more big data).

Much of this process is highly automated and not always accurate anyway. Google still asks me if I want to download and install Chrome even though I already have and am logged in to Apps or Accounts! 

Lest we forget, Google does not exist as an altruistic, charitable concern; services are provided free of charge, but there is a cost: snippets of our personal information. If you aren't happy to reveal these, there are other search engines available, writes Rhodri Marsden in the Independent.  

So the bottom line is, if you’re not willing to make the trade; don’t use Google!

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