One could say that using Google today is something that belongs to our life like grocery shopping – but it is much easier and most of all we use it so much due the fact that is doesn’t cost us anything…. But is this really true? We may not have to pay cash indeed but we pay something that is actually much more valuable for us – our privacy. No matter what our interest is in, we spend a lot of our time searching on Google for pictures, articles, books, forums and anything informative about our topic of interest not realizing that every single one of our moves on the World Wide Web is happening under constant observation.
In the “Cost of Free” Dr. Aleks Krotoski has investigated for the BBC series “The Virutal Revolution” how Google, Facebook, Amazon and Co. make billions of money by creating a very profitable advertising system. These organisations pay for the right to “secretly” or rather unnoticed tailor potential consumers who are using the Internet, targeting them according to their interest and activities on the net.
People and their personal data therefore get more and more available on the Internet without being aware of it. Emails, Likes, Interests and Activities are all browsed which means that what we actually find so great about the internet – its ‘free’ service – is in reality everything else but free.
In an article for the BBC today Jo Wade who is the Assistant Producer of the “Virtual Revolution” put it this way:
Every day in Britain millions of searches are carried out on Google for free. Every month we spend millions of hours on Facebook for free and read millions of articles from free newspapers.
But now look at it the other way round.
Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.
Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.
Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.
So you’re not just being watched, you’re being traded. The currency has changed!!!!
So with this change in society we need to think about where this trend is heading and urgently need to ask ourselves how much of our personal life’s we are willing to share with the whole public in the future…..
