OnlineAssignment_4-5_Reubish

Anna Reubish

Something that I have always heard is that once you put something out on the internet, it is out there for good and there is no way to take it back. It’s weird to me that there is actually a record of what the World Wide Web knows about me and my online personality. It is interesting how they can infer certain traits and interests just by analyzing what I have “liked” on Facebook or searched on Google. I guess it really is true, that once we put something on the internet it is there to stay.

The Google results were surprisingly less exciting than I was anticipating. I think that I overuse Google more than the next person. I am constantly Googling unnecessary things, so maybe that is why they did not give me a lot of nonspecific information. If I looked only at the column that was conducted from only ad research, no including my Google+ account, the only definite information they had was I was a women between the ages of 18-24. It gave me a large list of 88 topics that I am ‘interested’ in. These seemed very vague and more categorical than anything else. They were a very wide variety of these categories listed, ranging from finance to Brazilian music. I wouldn’t technically say that I am actively interested in finance or Brazilian music, so if there was an ad in the sidebar of a webpage there would be a low likelihood that I would actually click it. I suppose that a lot more people use Google so they can paint with a wider brush and hope to hit at least some people. Also if they are analyzing a computer account without any google account attached, they have to add that variety because there would be no way to tell who specifically is using the search engine. 

With Facebook, I was kind of surprised with how much information they had readily available for me. It only took them 15 minutes to get me my archives and it listed all of my information. It had all of my friends, messages, photos, wall posts, etc. The ads section was interesting because it had listed every ad that I have clicked on and I could see a pattern emerging from what I have previously chosen. It was funny to see the pages I liked and the events I attended right when I got my Facebook. My Facebook has really changed from 8^th grade until now. It’s kind of embarrassing that they include those actions into account while choosing what to advertise and promote to me.

After looking at the two different accounts I was left thinking why did Facebook give so much more information than Google? I don’t really think that Facebook is a very transparent company but they were much more willing to share more information than Google in a very easy way. They did not have any secrets I could think of, but Google has to have more information than they were sharing. Why would they not be willing to share as much as Facebook was? It was interesting to see what traits they could compile to create our personalities online. I would be intrigued to learn more about how they use that information that they have on consumers.