About Privacy:
Filter Bubble - How Giants Make Money
It all started with very subtle content improvements. You saw that ads served by Google became more accurate and strangely enough, on every website you visited, ads were served for your specific location. No big deal. After all, it is better to see relevant ads than random products you would never buy.
I am sure you asked yourself many times how come all these great services available online are free. How is it possible that giants such as Google or Facebook, which are valued in billions of euros, are offering all this great stuff for free? It is simple... they have only one really valuable product on sale... you!
How exactly do they make money?
It is quite simple. They constantly collect information about you, your browsing habits, spending trends and how much time you spend online. Once a good chunk of data has been collected, they offer big corporations the opportunity to serve their ads to a targeted group of people.
Let's say you spent a bit of time researching mobile phones. All of a sudden you see ads from major mobile networks in your country and Amazon sends you special sale offers on the latest smartphones. Coincidence? Not at all.
Where is the problem then?
All this is pretty harmless... after all you want to see relevant ads. But the problem lays somewhere else. These companies start making decisions for you without making you aware of the changes. It's no longer only ads. The news you see, the pages that show up in search results... everything is filtered and based on guesstimates.
Facebook only shows you updates from friends you communicate with most, Google tries to guess which page will be most relevant to your query, location and browsing history. We can all hope and naively trust that the results we see are picked for our convenience but the stuff that we don't see can be important too, and it should be us making the decisions about what is important and what isn't.
Soon we will only see pages and connections that influence us to buy stuff. Google, Facebook and other social networks are advertising companies... this is how they make money and the more targeted their ads are, the bigger their revenues.
How can we change this?
You might think that logging out of all accounts and clearing your browser history, cookies and cache will save you from this. The truth is that it doesn't matter - your IP is enough to collect data about your online activities and every device connected to the Internet has one. If you are lucky enough to have a modern smartphone, then your location is also traced and stored.
There is not much we can do individually other than making others aware of these common practices. It is already being investigated in many countries (including the UK) and hopefully new laws will be introduced to prevent companies from filtering content without user awareness before it gets too far. Google and Apple have already been charged for storing location data on mobile devices.
