As a student, I tend to spend a large amount of time online
researching for papers and homework assignments I have been given. A large amount of my free time is also spent
online, going on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as
online shopping or just futzing around.
For these reasons, there is a large amount of data about myself within
the Internet that both Google and Facebook have collected. It was extremely interesting to view because
both sets of data, that from Google and that from Facebook, were accurate in
their predictions as well as surprising.
The data
Google had compiled about me, based on what I have searched for in the past,
was fairly accurate. There was a list of
my interests it had created and most of the interests listed were things I like
or liked in the past. It was in a way
funny to look at because some of the interests were strange such as pet
nutrition and recording industry. I have
no idea how they came to the conclusion that those were in my interest field
because thinking back, I don’t recall searching for anything that was in those
categories. Looking at all of the
interests it made me think back to what I have been searching for and how it
could lead to defining my interests in the way that Google has.
Looking at
my Facebook history, it was interesting to see the way my use of the social
media website has changed since I began using it in 2009. One of the main things I noticed that has
really changed is my use of apps. There
was a section in my Facebook data that displayed all of the Facebook apps I
have used while my account has been active.
Honestly, more than half of the apps on the list I have no recollection
of using and I’m positive I used in the beginning days of my time on
Facebook. There were a collection of
quizzes that are extremely embarrassing to know that I took, one of them being “Who
lives under your bed?” I have no idea
why I would even think to take this quiz, but I have changed a lot since I was
a freshman in high school. The more
recent apps shown are apps that go along with websites that I have signed up on
through Facebook such as Pandora, Spotify, Youtube, and so on.
It is
amazing how much information there is about someone that has been stored and
collected within the Internet. It also
extremely terrifying to think of because there are things that I look up on the
Internet and post on the internet that are slightly embarrassing. Also it is scary to think of what someone
could do with the information that is collected, someone’s life could possibly
be ruined by what someone else could find.
After seeing everything, I plan to be a lot more cautious in what I am
putting out into the world wide web.
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