When did Google join the Dark Side? It is difficult to say. One could argue that they took the first step with GMail, but I think that it happened when it became the de-facto internet search engine and obliterated its competition. Now Google has a new service that should send shivers down privacy advocates’ spines. You can now login to Google and keep track of your searches. I don’t know about you, but I will never sign up to something like that because I think that my web searches say too much about me. Yes, I have lots of searches on Anime and computer games and the such, but my preoccupation is much more basic than worries about typecasting and geek stereotypes. Internet searches would record anything: your shopping patterns, how much time you spend researching about a subject, your tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes, who are you keeping an eye out for, political and sexual preferences, bittorrent searches and the like. Too much power, and I cannot trust Google anymore not to sell that information to data miners.
What data does Spotify hold about you?
Last week I read a very interesting Twitter thread by Jack Edwards in which he made a subject data request to Spotify. Amongst all the data about your listening habits there’s a file called inferences.json, Read more…
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