A World of Surveillance

What is privacy? In the United States, we feel as though our privacy is a part of our American privilege. With all new technology our privacy is deeply endangered. Your every move and information that you put on the Internet can be tracked, traced and stored without your knowledge. In Simson Garfinkel's book Privacy and the New Technology: What They Do Know Can Hurt You he say’s "It's a future in which what little privacy we now have will be gone. Some people call this a loss of privacy” (Garfinkel). We are slowly becoming a society that George Orwell predicted in his book 1984. A future where our every move is tracked or stored and what media we view is censored.  

Even Google has had a great impact on our Internet lives and privacy. Googlization is happening, even though it may not be as clear we would like. In Siva Vaidhaydanathan's book The Googlization of Everything: And Why We Should Worry Siva puts it best by saying "we are not Google's customers: we are it's product". Even though we many not like to think it, Google does affect different areas of our lives. Google affects our personal decisions like our political opinions or our moral ideas on subjects like abortion or gay rights. Google also has the power to control and survey almost the entire world. Almost everyone use’s Google and because of this, it’s power just keeps growing. Google keeps track of what you do on the Internet, your likes, dislikes, what your favorite food is and even your fetishes. They even show you advertisements based on your likes. If you are worried about Big Brother Google watching your moves you do have the option to change your privacy settings to make it harder for them to track you. But when that happens Google slows down your services. 

Google even stores everything about us. For example, during class we had three people go and Google their names. Nothing came up when the first boy searched his name. I was the one who searched my name second. But when I looked up my name nothing about me showed up. The third boy went up and videos and pictures and news articles popped up about him. This was because he had played juniors hockey and the almost everything that came up was about his hockey life. Even though nothing came up when I searched my name there is a lot of stuff on the Internet that I have posted or things that have been posted about me. If you look up my name and my old high schools name, lots of old athletic records and race times come up. On the other hand if you search my main Internet name, lots of things come up. I have a vast life on the Internet but I never use my real name, only my one username.

If there ever is a day where Google does decide to use our information, we have a lot at stake and in the open. It just goes to show that we need to be careful what we post on the Internet. You never know who will end up with your personal information in their hands.