Mobile applications have become an integral part of our daily life. The homepage of many peopleās browsers, including mine, is Google. In addition to being the biggest search engine, our daily life is inevitably using applications from Google such as Google Maps, Google Translate, YouTube, etc. By reading the topic of post 2 and the reading material, Iām wondering how much information Google has gained from me.
I found the website https://takeout.google.com and https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated. On the adssetting website, I got a profile of myself about age, gender, hobby, even the content I browsed. What is even more shocking to me is that, in the downloaded personal data from takeout website, I saw all my browsing history on YouTube, including browsing history and search history; also, I saw all the places I have been on Google Maps. Modern technology applications have indeed brought great convenience to my daily life, but it is scary to find that so many private data are recorded. After browsing some news, I found that Googleās privacy policy has been criticized more than once. Google claims that ācombine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.ā As an ordinary user, I have no idea where they will use my data. All I could do is trying to use private mode on the browser and turn off the location data.
When we talk about common websites, LinkedIn is also inevitable for most people. LinkedIn is a leading workplace social networking platform that people could connect with other people with their workplace identities. It serves over 600 million workforces from more than 200 countries. On the platform, a user is able to demonstrate his or her employment information including name, gender, industries, employers, experiences, educational background as well as contact details. To develop workplace social relationship, people are keen to showcase their veritable private information which is usually utilized for commercial purposes by LinkedIn. People like headhunters or sales see LinkedIn as a reliable channel that provides real leads. However, it also becomes a channel of trading privacy. By finding out or searching for your employer, you might easily get involved in commercial espionage activities such as a leak or inside-trade. Moreover, connecting with your peers or colleagues is not necessarily to be a helpful thing, you are more likely to unconsciously expose some sensitive information to people you donāt know.
Living in the era of big data, privacy protection has become a hot topic in our life. The technological development and the results of data analysis have indeed brought a lot of convenience to our life, we cannot ignore the threat it poses as well.
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Google Privacy & Terms
https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en&gl=ca