Does Monetary Gain Outweigh Privacy?
The Internet within the world today has become an inseparable part of people’s lives. Within any developed country there is almost no escape from its wide reach. The Internet nowadays is needed to contact possible employers or to reach out to long lost friends across the globe. The Internet is currently one of the most convenient ways to obtain information ranging from where a relative is currently living to recipes for fried chicken. However, often what most people do not realize is that at the same time they are collecting information from the internet, the internet is also simultaneously collecting their information as well. In fact, the collection and sale of people’s information have become one of the biggest markets in
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So it really boils down to if the economic gains from this trade outweigh its questionable ethicality. Saying the collection and sale of information that is going on in the internet is widespread is a large understatement. Most of the free services offered on the internet are completely dependent on this trade. Ira Rubinstein a staggering advocate for privacy has discovered that some of the companies that undergo this trade are Google, Facebook, and Youtube. Google alone accounts for the staggering “25 percent of all recorded internet traffic”, with more than “60 percent of all web-enabled devices” using their service in an average day(Rubinstein 1). Beyond that Google also hosts a program that is known as AdSense to encourage other websites to maximize their traffic as well. What this program basically does is pay a set amount of money based on the number of advertisement and number of visits. All this internet advertising is fueled by one thing, advertisements targeted to specific users based on their search habits that Google has