Author Archives: kmcgovern

Anonymization

“Anonymization” comes from the promise that Google only retains personal information for eighteen months after cataloging it. However, this process of “Anonymization” is ineffective, as it only eliminates a few digits of the IP Address and in many cases the information of a person’s identity is retained by the cookies left by the website.

This “Anonymization”, a proposed method of keeping the user’s identity and internet habits private, operates under the auspices of being a surefire method of maintaining user’s privacy. Yet this supposedly effective method does not completely erase the archived data left by users. This shows the dichotomy between the user’s perceived illusion of anonymity versus the actuality of Google’s privacy policy. This highlights the basic discrepancy between the perception of Google’s supposed value of privacy and the actual implementation of protecting it. It shows how many users do not wholly understand the misleading nature of Google’s privacy policies.

Emphasis of “You”

The Emphasis of “You” is a marketing technique employed by many major marketing programs. It is a focus placed upon the individual and how the individual interacts with technology and is empowered by it.

Websites such as a Google and Amazon focus their marketing and public image around personalization and catering to individual users. However, this apparent emphasis on “you” is a smokescreen to how these technologies pry into our privacy, collect data, and piggyback on our own contributions to the internet. This Emphasis of “You” exploits the human urge to create, connect, and build identities, and companies like Google use this quietly and subversively to harvest data and information from the individual.

The Emphasis of “You” distracts from the greater picture of what is happening because of Googlization, which is Google capitalizing on the sum total of our internet contributions. As a result, the “you” becomes a product of Google, all under the guise of self-determination.