Google’s ubiquitous internet power – and their instantly recognizable logo – raises worries with all the access it has to private user information.
If at one point in time, the internet was the Eden of anonymity, nowadays we see notions of privacy fading with every dollar made from private information. Social networks such as Facebook thrive from a user database that posts private and unique information on the website – backgrounds, likes and dislikes, personal content, even your thoughts, all information delectable to advertisers.
On Friday the 11th of October, the internet giant Google revealed it would be doing something similar – user settings, information, and online activity will be available in ads across the web. While on one hand such a collective of personal information (as Google and Facebook argue) will allow the websites to create more intuitive web services to users, many others argue that this is a violation of the expectations of users who post their information online. While it seems like just a minor change – and the new Google terms of use list it as only a minor change – the profits that can be made, when extrapolated to the enormous number of Google users, are not to be ignored.
Social marketing, as it is termed, is an incredibly lucrative business. If a person likes a specific song, ads for that song will show his or her information, comments and endorsements for that song or album. If someone seeing that ad happens to know the person, the social connection makes the ad much more pivotal.
On one hand, these enormous internet services are free – free to access, that is. Social marketing is aggressive, and Google is not the first company to engage in it. While the daily change seems minuscule, there is a large-scale privacy concern that causes even Google to limit these social ads to people 18 or older. It becomes the users main responsibility to protect their own privacy online – some might call it a steep price to pay in exchange for the virtual networking that is so incorporated into our daily lives. Technological mediums have changed – the internet is tying the world closer than ever, but whereas at one point in time phone numbers had to be listed in a phone book, having more information like a name and photo next to something endorsed raises incredible concerns for privacy mitigations that might come in the name of profit.
