I found this assignment to actually
be very interesting. After going through and reading all of the information
that Google and Facebook had collected about me I was actually shocked to see
how much was actually accurate. The amount of correct information that Google
had about me surprised me even more so than the amount that Facebook did. I
think that is because I willingly post personal information onto Facebook and
like certain pages which would make it easy for them to know my age, interests,
etc. I do not post that personal information on Google though, so it was a real
shock to see how close they were to profiling me correctly.
The first site that I checked was
Facebook. It got my basic characteristics correct like the fact that I am a
male and what my correct age was. That was not so surprising. What did freak me
out a little bit was how much stuff they had from my first few years of having
a Facebook account. In fact, it seemed like they had pretty much everything.
Every invitation to an event or party that someone has sent me, every picture
that I had posted; they had everything. One thing that I had heard about before
did not really believe was that if you connected your Facebook profile with your
phone, that they would be able to retrieve information off of your phone. It turns
out that its true. They had a list of my contacts and other personal
information that I have on my phone. That was probably the scariest part of
this whole assignment.
When I looked at what information Google
had on me I was even more surprised than I was with what Facebook had. Google accurately
guessed my age, gender, and quite a few of my interests like certain sports and
types of music as well as the fact like I love to travel and have an interest
in business. I was surprised to see however, how many things that they got
wrong. The three interests that were most bizarre that appeared on my list were
Bollywood and South Asian film, fencing, and NASCAR. The fact that any of those
interests showed up is completely puzzling to me.
Overall, I found this online
assignment to be quite interesting and entertaining. It was fascinating to see
what Google and Facebook profiled me like. I always considered myself a conscientious
user of Facebook when it came to the information and items that I posted to
that social networking site. Frankly, it is pretty scary to think about the
fact that the internet makes it so incredibly easy to find out information
about people, even stuff that you thought was private. I am sure we have all
tried to “google” ourselves or our family members and friends before and some
pretty funny or cool things showed up about them, but to see how accurate and
in-depth their profiling is, is quite alarming.
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