Bing Google Play commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yZ5O96TtM
This commercial is currently being aired on television today. I thought it was funny and it immediately reminded me of various discussions we had in class. In this commercial Bing is stating that Google is using their Google Play app store to obtain our personal information and send it out to who knows where. This not only relates to class discussions but to Pariser’s the Filter Bubble and the topic of “Do Not Track” as well. The Do Not Track feature is a idea which would attempt to stop companies from gathering personal information. Do Not Track is doing its job, but it doesn’t erase the fact that companies already have an obscene amount of our personal information in their databases. Bing is out to exploit Google. It’s interesting to see that Bing is exploiting Google’s gathering of personal information and using it as a way to get consumers to use the Bing search engine. After watching this commercial and related it to the many discussions we had in class, I ask you one question; Are you getting Scroogled?
I see this as a finger-pointing game between Google and Bing. Fact is that Google developed and released most (if not all) of its tools first, before Bing later copied them. So why should we as consumers have to trust Bing more than Google mining/holding our data and making a profile of us? Nonetheless, it is a great thing that multiple search engines exist, which promotes competition and innovation between them. And in theory the more equal “market share” is between search engines (or any industry) the consumer will get more, for less.