It is scary to think how much the internet knows about us. It knows our age, our gender, what we like, what we don’t like, even where we’ve been.
Yet, we let it.
We agree to these cookies that allow pages on the internet to share data based on what we’re looking at just because we want to get rid of the annoying little tab on the top/bottom of our screen (I even got one when previewing this blog post!).
These cookies provide platforms, such as Google, with so much data about us, that it can literally predict what we want to read. They allow search engines like Google to tailor our web searches to us, filtering out all the pages that it thinks that we don’t want to see.
How are we supposed to explore what’s out there on the internet if it continues to tell us what we already think?
However, I can’t complain too much. In some ways, it does have its advantages. Like on Spotify, when I get bored of listening to the same playlist over and over again, I have a custom made playlist full of new and different songs based on what I have previously listened to. It even tells me when my favourite artists have released new songs!
Feel free to have a listen of my most recent Spotify ‘Release Radar’ notification.
MJC Language and New Media Blog 
I don’t like the history-tracking function of Youtube. At the end of the day, it keeps suggesting the videos I have watched before or relative videos that were posted long ago and nothing new, but I open Youtube to watch NEW videos!
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I know the feeling! I have the same with Spotify sometimes where I get recommended songs that are already in my playlists. Sometimes the algorithms work brilliantly and other times they just confuse me.
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Wow, Def Leppard! What have you been listening to? It’s funny how people don’t seem to mind the surveillance much because we value the convenience.This is known as the ‘privacy paradox’, the fact that even though we think we value privacy, we don’t behave as if we do. (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585317302022)
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Got to love a bit of Def Leppard! 😂
The ‘privacy paradox’ is an interesting concept, however I think it all comes down to what we want people to see. For example, I don’t mind people seeing what music I listen to because this music is available to everyone, so lots of people are able to listen to similar music to me. Whereas I wouldn’t want others to see how much money I have in my bank account, so this is protected online with multiple passwords and pins.
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