Q1
a.
My opening message in the online tutor group was:
Hi Guys,
Having read all the posts in here it seems that I am in the minority in saying I love all that Google do.
While I totally appreciate the slight negative opinions of others here in my personal opinion it all comes down to the fact that Google is actually a business and so has to make money. I appreciate that some of its dealings are a little 'shady' but show me a Global corporation that doesn’t come across this way in some elements of what it does. (Think Apple and its over priced media services.)
I hope you don’t mind my quoting you Valeria but I think you make a great point when you say
"Since the information that they can gather regarding myself is not potentially significant (or at least that is what I think), I don't really mind. I have nothing to hide, and if they have to intrude a little bit just to find out that actually I am not the bad guy so they can move on and find the real criminals"
This to me is the biggest point. Having worked within the Intelligence Environment for some years of my military time it amuses and baffles me that people get so annoyed over what they feel is their personal data being used and abused. One of our biggest flaw as Humans is to believe we are each individually so important that everything we ever put online is of interest to many millions of people, (Take the phenomenon that is twitter as an example) when in reality nothing at all you say or do on line is. Yes the sites you click on are monitored to target advertising etc. but that is not you personally they are looking at it is just a number. Be that an IP address or area code to post junk mail to.
Nathan you point about not having to put your real name, email etc. is a great one too. They can only know things that you personally surrender to them.
On a slight tangent but still very much Google and search engine orientated this article really does bring the whole George Orwell,