David Paradis: Research Question

Posted on October 17, 2011 by david.paradis

To what extent can google distribute personal information and search quires to companies and marketing agencies, and is google trustworthy of deciding what to do with this information in a responsible manner?

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4 Responses to David Paradis: Research Question

  1. michael.alberti says:
    October 19, 2011 at 11:05 am

    I think you should focus more on one topic instead of two. Also, the first topic doesn’t really seem complete. Maybe you should try rewording it to “to what extent should
    google distribute our personal history to its advertisers.” I think that narrows down the topic and you should be able to get more direct information relevant to your topic.

  2. sherif.elzanie says:
    October 25, 2011 at 2:33 pm

    I am going to have to agree with Albert on this one. You should probably focus on the first question and maybe incorporate the debate whether they are qualified in determining whether they should distribute the information. I also think that personal information should be narrowed to search quires. Personal information can be misinterpreted for information stored on Google accounts. You might also want to refer to it as “the Google Search” so that it is not confused with the other Google services.

  3. geeta.kumar says:
    October 25, 2011 at 8:28 pm

    Seeing as how both topics can easily be turned into two different research papers, I think you should pick one of the two. I personally find the first topic more interesting and easier to find material on it. The video we watched in class “In Google We Trust” might be a good source because I remember it talked about a woman’s information being displayed out for the public to see which could be a good testimony for anyone writing a paper on this topic.

  4. Stephen Francoeur says:
    October 26, 2011 at 9:04 pm

    I think your classmates are correct in seeing two questions when there should only be one. To complicate this matter a bit, as you rethink your question, you should take into account the reality that lots of companies share with marketers personal information they’ve gathered from you. If you’ve had a credit card, taken out a loan, subscribed to a magazine, or signed up with any number of websites where you set up an account (Facebook, MySpace, a gaming site), chances are some information about you and your preferences has been sold to marketing firms. How is what Google doing any different? I’m not defending Google, but I am suggesting that Google is not alone in these practices.

    The Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles in the summer of 2010 that did a great job of detailing all the ways that your online activity is tracked and shared by all manner of websites and companies. You will definitely want to read the articles in that series. Before you focus entirely on Google’s violation of privacy, you need to understand how other sites are doing similar things (on an admittedly smaller scale).

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