Helder Correia: Research Question

Posted on October 16, 2011 by helder.correia

To what extent has the use of Google’s different features allowed for the distribution of a user’s personal information?

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3 Responses to Helder Correia: Research Question

  1. maria.pafitis says:
    October 19, 2011 at 8:07 pm

    Hi Helder!
    This is a very good question but I feel that its a little too broad. Google offers a lot of different features like Maps, Gmail, AdSense and so on. This would be too generalize to write a brief essay and you will not know where to begin. I feel that you should pick like two or a maximum of three which again might be a little too much and explain how they distribute personal information. Being that Gmail might be the feature that will have the most personal information of a user I feel that will be perfect to talk about. Also, you might want to talk about a users rights when using that specific feature. Hope it helps ! goodluck !

  2. michael.alberti says:
    October 25, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    Helder,
    You should narrow down your topic to include one MAJOR Google service. For example, you can talk about its search engine and how people wouldn’t want their search queries known to the public. You need to be more specific in your research question. Like Maria said, you have to be specific and explain how they distribute your personal information to companies or even the government, etc. Maybe this help a little bit.

  3. Stephen Francoeur says:
    October 26, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    Your classmates have done an admirable job of suggesting ways to narrow down your focus to one specific part of the Google empire. As you rework your question, you’ll want to pay close attention to the wording as well and make sure that it always spells out what you really mean. The phrase “distribution of a user’s personal information” could be unpacked were you to rewrite it. You’d want to spell out what you mean by “distributing,” as that’s a bit vague about what’s really going on. “Personal information” is also vague, too. Are you interested in the demographic information that a user provides when they sign up for a service and what Google does with that? Do you mean the history of a person’s searches? The trail of websites that they visited and that was tracked by cookies?

    Maybe you might want to explore the ways that Google tracks you in unexpected ways and find a question there. In the book that I read over the summer, Steven Levy’s book about Google, In the Plex, he spends a lot of time detailing Google’s internal debates over how it would retain and maybe anonymize surfing history data that it collected. Perhaps there’s a question there.

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