As I read the document “Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you. The Guardian.” I noticed how much information Google has about me. With this document I learned a lot. I never imagined that Google would have saved my search history since the first time I Googled something which was back in 2009. This kind of information is interesting, but it is also scary. This I say because now I feel that I have someone looking, hearing, and seeing what I am doing 24/7. Google literally has every piece of information about me. It knows where I am at the moment, what I like to do, who are my friends and family, what workouts I do, what I eat, where I have to be in a month, what alarms I have, where I go to college, which are my favorite hangout spots, my contacts, and so on… I have not done or searched for anything illegal or something that is compromising, so Google has nothing on me. I have a problem with Google knowing everything about me because I think it is disrespectful that I do not have my privacy. With all of this I want to say that people need to be careful with what they search for because now I know that nothing you do or search for is 100% private. For example, I have Disconnect.me and this helps me know what companies are trying to track my every move with every site I visit. I searched for ENDI which is a newspaper that I frequently use and some of the companies that were trying to track me were: tinypass.com, bootstrapcdn.com, gfradn.net, listamax.com, and amazonaws.com. 

By reading articles and watching various videos that the professor provided about this topic I was even more shocked by the minute. It is actually insane how much information the internet carries about you; by the internet I mean Google and Facebook. Google knows your entire day by day life and so does Facebook but on a smaller scale. We can say that Facebook is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collected data. Facebook has collected data that you did not even realize that this platform could have. Facebook collects your phone book, friends you deleted years ago, registers your location, keeps records on ads you have clicked on, keeps records on the advertisers that have your contact information, and so on… Basically, what the three articles and the three videos communicate is that Google and Facebook know your every move even if you do not know they are present in your life day and night. They have copies of all your information, including the deleted and the recent ones, and you can actually obtain all of it. When we go online and specially when we post online, we should have in mind that our private communication might be intercepted and read by advertisers, news outlets, governments, and criminals alike. By mentioning that, I want to say that I searched for the information that Facebook has about me and it literally holds my personal information since the first day that I decided to open my account. Also, I remember that one day, very long ago, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account and that is also registered in the records that they have on me. This is curious because the same thing happened to Brian X. Chen (the guy from the I Downloaded the Information that Facebook Has on Me. Yikes.). Some of the essential tips on how to not get your identity stolen, which can happen, is to be very careful with what information you post online, keep your software up to date, make secure passwords, and last but not least, have a different password for each site. 

In my personal opinion, I believe that us humans have the right to do our things privately. Of course, I am not talking about harming anyone, it is just that we should have the right to navigate through the internet without sites knowing our every move. That is creepy, inconsiderate, and I take it to be very disrespectful because it is obstructing my privacy.