"People's Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them"

"In some cases, the most intimate questions a person is asking—about health worries, relationship woes, financial hardship—are the ones that set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline.

All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see...

while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers—online, via phone, and by mail—for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits...

Not only are lenders taking advantage of people in vulnerable financial situations, not only are lead generators sometimes skirting Google’s ad policies and even violating state laws, but companies are sharing individual data in a way that puts consumers directly at risk. All this comes down to the widespread availability and longevity of personal data online...

The effect may be a more pleasant online experience for someone who is perceived to have more income"

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google-searches-privacy-danger/413614/

I think there would be a lot of value in going back to what it was the Internet was supposed to be, what it was supposed to provide people, and thinking about how that Internet would be designed for 2015.

I feel like all I read these days are all the ways we are dissatisfied or scared of the Internet. But, at this point, it's such an integral part of our lives. For example, in science research - no one reads physical copies of journals anymore, those are practically ornamental. We use specialized search engines to find what we are interested in and then print it out or read it online.

Related: Reddit how Internet was supposed to be; 2015 is year Internet died