Many people in this modern day believe the internet is a free economy where you can partake in services such as Youtube videos and sites like Google with their search engines, maps, etc. without paying with a monetary value. These people may also believe that their private information is simply being passed around from company to company like so many crumbled ones from bank to bank. While a portion of this can be considered true it is still entirely inaccurate. Jim Harper seeks to explain this, in his essay “Web Users Get as Much as They Give,” by explaining how the internet is an information economy where instead of paying for services with money we pay for it with our privacy. He also informs us that even though our privacy is being used as the currency on the internet it is not entirely unsecure nor is it as invasive as we like to imagine.
Harper starts off by telling us about internet Cookies, text files that websites generate and store in our computers that keep track of our preferences and allows the website to recognize our computer. Cookies can be convenient like when you zoom in on a webpage and the browser remembers that option for other pages (temporary cookies) or when google asks if you want it to remember your Facebook password for future use (permanent cookies). Then there is the cookies that keep track of when you were looking at shoes on Ebay or when you googled picture frames. These are the cookies people worry are sneaking their information off to the four corners of the world, but Harper does his best to put those fears to rest. “Most Web sites and ad networks do not “sell” information about their users” (Harper 546) he continues explain that if they were to sell that information it would in effect hurt their own business by giving their competitors an edge over them. In other words, your information is safe with the companies who use that information to cater advertisements to you.
There is also benefits to this personalized advertising...