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You are what you click

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Internet may be facing serious risk of getting censored because of some of the controversial information. For example, the issue of privacy violation is very common. Major internet providers such as Google are facing a number of lawsuits related to privacy violation. For example, David Auerbach asserts that Google has been paying huge amount of fines for privacy violations such as tracking users of Apple’s Safari browser and impeding an FCC. However, as David Auerbach argues, most of these violations are not taken seriously. They just bubble through the news and stir public outrage, which is often followed by a backlash and occasionally a fine. The essay will support the thesis which states that “You are what you click” by describing why privacy violation remain a chronic condition.

The first factor facilitating privacy violation in internet, as expressed in the article is that privacy violation is the source of huge money to internet providers such as Google. The article reveals astonishing findings related to how Google have managed to survive and remain at the top. According to the article, companies such as Google and Facebook use the private information of internet users to get money. Google can observe people and hence enable all the advertising companies use it. That is why the article indicated that Internet marketing companies that aren’t Google can’t observe people at the moment of search but knowing more about their lives might help refine targeted advertising. This is evidenced by the fact that the Google’s gross revenue was $37.9 billion in 2011 compared to Facebook, which was just $3.7 billion.

The second reason facilitating the privacy violation is that most of the companies such as Google and Yahoo just acts like information pipeline. The article argues that the reason why some of privacy violations cannot be discovered easily is that most of the big companies carry out more mysterious activities than smaller companies such as Acxiom, BlueKai and Next Jump. Big companies acts as pipeline of data and do not need to engage transactions with data exchanges. They handle data internally. Because they handle sufficient amount of consumer data, they can easily replicate the working model through different stages such as observation, collection, aggregation and targeting. Because of this, it is hard to pinpoint the company responsible for privacy violations.

Another factor identified in the article is that most of the promises made concerning privacy are false. This is evidenced by the fact that there are many cases where data otherwise regarded as anonymous can be identified with particular users. The article gives several examples concerning how anonymous data can be matched with users. For example, Netflix user history otherwise released anonymously such as consumer purchases, website visits, health information can be identified easily including the personal information. AOL large data sets, for example, were immediately identified by the New York Times and others. Consequently, it is apparent that privacy policies today give false sense of security.

From the foregoing chapters, it is apparent that privacy and protection of the private data in Internet is not easy task. In fact regulations and advocacy have been consistently losing ground against the advertising phenomenon. Laws such as HIPAA do not guarantee anonymity. That is why cases such as imposing fine on Google are irrelevant in the current Internet age. This is because there is no legal or regulatory infrastructure set up to monitor the collection, aggregation and trading of consumer information. This means that however much we are still using internet, what we do is what it comes out to others. That is why it is true to say you are what you click.