The Privacy Of Online Consumers And Search Engines

For one thing, Google, like the railroad in its time, is an important part of how people interact with each other today. People use Google to digitally meet with others, communicate, and even sell things. Multiple people are affected by Google each day. 87% of people have claimed to use the internet in 2016 (Anderson). To add onto this the number of people who don’t use the internet has been decreasing since 2000.

Ever feel like you are being watched? How about having the feeling like some one is following you home from school? Well that is what it will be like if users do not have the privacy on the Internet they deserve. EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), a advocacy group that has been fighting the Clinton Administration for tougher online consumer protection laws, and other privacy protection agencies have formed to protect the rights and privileges of the Internet user. With the U.S. Government, EPIC has had to step in and help small companies and Internet users with their own privacy problems, hackers getting into their systems and ruining the networks, and crackers stealing and decrypting private

Nowadays, Americans use technology to obtain information, because it's easier than knowing the material. This has become a huge distraction and it’s making people rely on technology way more than is needed, especially the young people. For example, they use Google to search things like homework, essays, speeches, etc. They do this as a shortcut to getting their work done faster because they can find what they are looking for in a matter of seconds, instead of actually doing the work by themselves and it’s leading to an intellectually impoverished society. In the article, Is Google Making Us Stupid, the author believes that Google is used by most people to find information by just typing in a couple of words; however, those people don't learn the information or value knowledge (Carr). This wouldn’t be a problem for the people if they lived a tech-free life because without technology there is no reliance on it. Also if they lived a tech-free life, they wouldn’t have to worry about getting spied on. Technology, such as phones, is used to spy on people because the government and big companies like to keep track of their every move. In, That’s no phone. That’s my tracker, the author stated cellphone carriers respond to law enforcement's request for call data, internet use, GPS, etc. In 2011, they responded 1.3 million times to these request and this is just

Sergey Brin noted, “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.” Nicholas Carr’s essay challenges this assertion. Nicholas Carr believes even though there are multiple search engines, “the faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.” This topic elicits such strong responses because technology is a part of our everyday lives. Technology is only becoming more advanced and will continue to be a source of debate for all who use it.

Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” The quote shows modern society well. Living in 21th century is like living in a glass box. We are living in society that needs only a few clicks to get information of others.

Google doesn’t always follow the necessary procedures for their privacy policy, even going as far as skimming through student’s emails. While most are excited to be able to use Chromebooks, they forget that journalist Anya Kamenetz researched and looked into Google’s Chromebooks, "In March, as part of a federal

of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in 2008 in the Atlantic, believes that the internet is “tinkering with our brains” and has even admitted to seeing changes within himself. Carr created this article to inform people about how societies ability to read and comprehend information is being changed or harmed by the use of the internet. Carr did have some errors such as structural problems with his thesis and also struggled with an informal writing style. Despite some of these errors, Carr’s use of rhetorical techniques such as ethos, pathos, logos, and ample amount of personal and factual information along with the emotional touches, allows him to develop a strong persuasive argument.

What have you ‘Googled’ recently? According to Lori Andrews, the leading expert on bioethics and emerging technology, data aggregators can make their own rules when it comes to collecting your data. Three important essays have been written using rhetorical appeals in order to construct a convincing argument that make us consider what we do on the Web and how it could impact us. Content that we search for on the Web often leads advertising companies to making judgments about us that could affect many things in our day to day lives—wrongly so. A person’s search history could be the one thing that makes or breaks their chance of getting a bank loan or be unfairly categorized just because of their demographics.

Imagine that every search, post, ping, or tweet was tracked by a big corporation or even the government. This is a scary though but in reality, the search history of the American people is a high commodity for big business and the government alike. The purpose of this essay will be to examine the article titled “The Internet is a Surveillance State” by Bruce Schneier. This essay will examine Schneier’s credibility towards the source, the importance of when the article was written, and the ideals Schneier had towards the topic of internet surveillance.

And I say this in a literal sense. We believe that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. In most every other country, the accused is guilty until substantial evidence proves that they are innocent. This is significant in the cases of how a jury can form a bias before a person is even given a chance to defend themselves or see the smallest piece of evidence as enough to convict them following the American court system. In other countries, there needs to be solid evidence to prove innocence and it provides for more of a challenge and an in depth analysis of the case for the jury present. In the context of this prompt, the government should not be able to intrude on people’s privacy before anything has even been done. Content searched on Google could be just as admissible as a five year old researching “how to blow up an ant” because they do not know any better or that they are doing it to simply mess around. If a person physically does something that enables them to be convicted of a crime, then the government should be able to look at a person’s private

The words, “Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say” were said by Edward Snowden who is a computer professional in America. Similarly, the essays “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty,” “Web Users Get as Much as They Give,” and “Facebook Is Using You” from Nicholas Carr, Jim Harper, and Lori Andrews respectively points out that the internet privacy is good and bad. However, the articles by Carr and Andrews are based on the negative side of the internet privacy, which means that the internet privacy is not good. On the other hand, Harper’s article is based on the positive side of the internet privacy, which means that the internet privacy is good and scary, but people need to be careful of their own information and browsing histories, and websites. Jim Harper’s essay is more relevant and reasonable than the Nicholas Carr and Lori Andrews’s essays. However, Harper seems more persuasive to readers because he believes that the internet is good if people use it in a right way, whereas Carr and Andrews believe that the internet is not good at all.

The concern about privacy on the Internet is increasingly becoming an issue of international dispute. ?Citizens are becoming concerned that the most intimate details of their daily lives are being monitored, searched and recorded.? (www.britannica.com) 81% of Net users are concerned about threats to their privacy while online. The greatest threat to privacy comes from the construction of e-commerce alone, and not from state agents. E-commerce is structured on the copy and trade of intimate personal information and therefore, a threat to privacy on the Internet.

Though Google seemed to promote free-thinking and free speech on one hand, they were censoring and filtering with the other. Google lost credibility with the public, thus tarnishing its public image and “loosing 1% of the U.S. market in one month,” as reported in The Business. (2006, Aug) “Image credibility is based on the constituency’s perception of the organization” (Argenti, 2009, p.39). When the public image of a company has been compromised it “can make a huge difference in determining the success or failure of the organization” (Argenti, 2009, p. 40). When the public looses confidence in a company and what they stand for, they no longer wish to use its product. In response, executives at Google attempted to convince the public that they could handle the balancing act between censorship and providing information, and gain back public trust and confidence.

Google is the most popular search engine that the world uses on an everyday basis. Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google in 1998. What started out to be a small search engine and ranking system are now the worlds most profitable Internet companies of our time. Google has created many products today that have changed the world of technology, products such as Google+, YouTube, Android, Motorola Mobility, the Nexus 7 tablet computer, Google Wallet, and Google Glass (p.470). Google is qualified as one of the best companies to work for (p.464.) The issue we are facing today is the privacy policy

Google is a company that was conceptualized in a dorm room by two Stanford University college students in 1996 (Arnold, 2005, p. 1) and has morphed into one of the greatest technological powerhouses in operation today. What began as merely a means to analyze and categorize Web sites according to their relevance has developed into a vast library of widely utilized resources, including email servicing, calendaring, instant messaging and photo editing, just to reference a few. Recent statistics collected by SearchEngineWatch.com reflects that of the 10 billion searches performed within the United States during the month of February, 2008, an impressive 5.9 billion of them were executed by Google (Burns, 2008). Rated as Fortune Magazine’s