When you’re using your social media platforms to share your breakfast, or searching for the perfect surround sound system, how does it effect your web browser searches on Google or Facebook?
Meta data is the a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. A consolidation of your searches and preferences allow for your devices and their installed apps to do something that most people appreciate in their everyday life, but despise if it’s brought up in conversation – Give you recommendations and suggestions while you’re using things such as Facebook and Amazon.
We are caught in a digital era that simultaneously promotes and reviles these metadata consolidations and are faced with a conundrum. What are we supposed to do about it? Do we allow google to collect data on us so we can receive perfectly formulated recommendations to our everyday searches, or do we duckduckgo and hope for the best, believing that an unbiased search engine may not give us exactly what we want, but will give us what we need without sucking us and our precious private information dry!
The most solid advice is that you should understand that what you put online will leave traces of your interests or inquiries and if you are concerned about what those are you should be more cautious to search for them online. Keep in mind that websites are nothing more than other computers that your computer is visiting that happens to house information that you are looking for. Just like your computer, these other computers can store information about things that happen on it and to it, if the owner chooses so. These remembrances (Cookies) can help you in the future if you return to visit this computer (website) and these memories aren’t there to attack you but in it’s most innocent form are there to help you. But just like everything, can be used for maliciousness. If you are truly concerned that your interests and inquiries could be used against you, maybe you shouldn’t use a personal computer to search for them, and perhaps if you are worried about how they will reflect on you maybe you shouldn’t be looking into them in the first place.
Leaders Check 