Activity: What platforms think of you

8.5. Activity: What platforms think of you#

In order to see more about what data mining does, we can look and see what some websites think about us.

The easiest one to do this with is Google.

Go to your google account (assuming you have one) profile information and go to “Data & Privacy” (this link might take you there). Then select the “Ad Settings” Ad personalization option (this link might take you there)

The Google Account screen with the Data & Privacy tab selected, and inside of that are "Ad Settings" which has an "Ad personalization" option, that when pressed takes you to your ad profile

Fig. 8.4 The Data & Privacy settings have a place where you can find the ad personalization settings.#

Then you can hopefully see a really long list of who Google thinks you are and what Google thinks you might be interested in, like this:

Try this yourself and see what Google thinks of you!

You can try social media sites as well. Twitter’s ad profile is located here and Facebook’s Ad information is here.

Note: Facebook used to allow users to see many more of the categories kept about them [h19] [h20].

8.5.1. Reflection#

After looking at your ad profile, ask yourself the following:

  • What was accurate, inaccurate, or surprising about your ad profile?

  • How comfortable are you with Google knowing (whether correctly or not) those things about you?

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