The Internet and changing expectations of privacy

[Quackers]

Most people don't even know, let alone care. I'm a huge fan of binding contracts between mutually consenting adults - it's the cornerstone of capitalism - but there's nothing mutual about this. Nobody is consenting to being tracked wherever they go on the internet: you don't even know whether a website has a "like" button on it unless you go there first, but by that point, it's already too late.

Eughh, It makes me feel uneasy when they have such power over me. As you said earlier in this thread they could easily use this information to humiliate me or worse. I feel sorry for Google employees, imagine if you left Google to join the Microsoft and Bing?! Corporate wars and your in the middle of it, jeeze...

I feel relatively safe about myself though, I''m extremely hesistent to release any information about my personal life to on the web, although sometimes i'm careless. I just hope nobody ever takes advantages of it

 

[Link]

I hope I can always spew whatever garbage I want on the internet without it ever hurting me in any way.
Luckily, I'll probably be able to so long as I live in the States.

 

[Bootstoots]

How often is someone's Google search information used to track that specific person and use their search histories against them, rather than being used for automated advertising programs? I'd like to know if that sort of "worst-case" privacy-breaching behavior has happened yet and if so how frequent it is.

Of course, even if the worst hasn't happened yet, we're still relying on a single company's pledge to "not be evil" in their use of our information. I'm definitely uneasy about that.

 

[DroopyTofu]

Even using it for automated advertising programs could have negative implications. For example, a young person is trying to find the website for Dick's Sporting Goods to check prices of football equipment. In the process they find the wrong website and Google records this. Forever. Suddenly, they are getting ads for other inappropriate websites and the problem becomes even worse than just a simple wrong website or typo.

 

[holy king]

someone searching the internet for dicks really shouldnt be a problem on the other hand.

 

[LucyDuke]

Even using it for automated advertising programs could have negative implications. For example, a young person is trying to find the website for Dick's Sporting Goods to check prices of football equipment. In the process they find the wrong website and Google records this. Forever. Suddenly, they are getting ads for other inappropriate websites and the problem becomes even worse than just a simple wrong website or typo.

I'm pretty sure Google doesn't serve such advertisements?

 

[innonimatu]

someone searching the internet for dicks really shouldnt be a problem on the other hand.

And that is an example of the one possible good thing I can see coming out of this loss of privacy: people becoming accepting of a lot of behaviors that should not be a problem but are currently often hidden/considered shameful, because they will see that so many people actually do those things after all.
But this is also a danger, because another examples of those behaviors could be, say, a politicians taking bribes. But, of course, that's already being done openly as "campaign contribution" and so on in many countries.

Weighting things, I think that having more information to judge on should not be a bad thing. Hopefully only the "false morals" will be overthrown, those things people will condemn in public but they themselves practice in private. Bribery and other such damaging behaviors are not, I hope, something most people go about doing in private. If/where they are, the situation is already hopeless.

Anyway, since there are several people from the UK discussing this I though this news piece may interest someone.