Metrics and Analytics: LJ2

     After enlightening myself through the reading of John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data novel, I find that I feel left with fright. In all honesty, I was incredibly naïve to how data collection, sale, and analysis worked. A specific part I found intriguing was when Cheney-Lippold began discussing Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007. With the addition of the new data DoubleClick provided, the author describes his personal experience with Google unlocking access to "which pages I visited, how often I visited them, how long I stayed on those pages when I did, and which pages I went to before and after visiting a certain site", as well as their pre-existing access to one's email and search history.  Furthermore, the truly engaging part is the statistics of how this compares to today, citing that "Google records data from more than a billion Google users, more than three billion search queries a day, more than 425 million Gmail accounts, and traffic from an estimated one million websites".  Personally, seeing these statics was a very eye-opening experience - one large corporation with access to my entire digital interactive network. Cheney-Lippold develops on this idea by, in summary, stating that our online activity has a direct result on who we become due to the fact that all of our data is collected for marketing and adverting certain products or ideas Google believes you'd be interested in. In all honesty, my family used to joke about getting an advertisement on one of our social media feeds for a product or event we were discussing at dinner, but after reading this article I am more aware to how truly dangerous and a bit terrifying it is. I believe this tactic to be unethical if used maliciously, but with good intent I see no harm - just harmful to my wallet as a shopaholic consumer! Going forward, I don't see a way to ever really avoid cookies and still be interactive online. However, I will definitely be on the search for more ways to protect my private information.