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We all love to search the web, wheter its to search for information or simply for our entertainment. We love going on social media and posting pictures, of our pets, our friends, travels, selfies and more. All of these are stuff most of us do are completely normal in this era we are living in. What we don’t know, is that everything we do is being tracked and stored. Doesn’t matter if your accounts are private, if you deleted pictures or even cleared your search history, it’s all stored in a database.

Google and Facebook are two of the biggest companies that do this. They have so much information about you that it can basically make a novel about you. Google keep tabs of where you’ve been, at what time you were there and how long it took you to get there. They also have this thing called ad personalization, what this does is that based on your searches and interests they create ads selling you a product. For example, I’m a photography student and I’m always looking for all sort of things related to it and sometimes I could be navigating a webpage and there I’ll see an add about low priced photography equipment. How they know I need affordable equipment? Well because I’m also a university student and don’t have much money for expensive equipment. Other things Google knows about you is all the apps you use and the YouTube videos you watch. In the other hand Facebook stores all the information of everything you’ve ever done there. From the stickers you’ve sent to all the conversations you ever had with anyone. They even have stored all the people you’ve unfriended in Facebook.

There is this app/program called Disconnect that can help you prevent pages you frequent to store your information and giving it to other companies or sites. Once you connect this app to your server (I connected it to Google Chrome) you’ll find the logo of Disconnect at the upper corner of the server, you click it and every time you enter a webpage you can see a number and that’s the amount sites your information gets shared to. For example when I use YouTube, 12 sites get my information based on the videos I watch and such. When I use Hulu the number is even higher, approximately 34 sites. And online stores have varying numbers from 4 to more than 30. This doesn’t mean these companies are bad and are conspiring against you by sharing your information. But it shows you how careful you should be when surfing the net and sharing information.

I find a bit weird all of this of my information getting stored in a database because I don’t really understand the necessity of doing this because, why is it necessary to store everything? My question is what are they going to do with all of it? The only part of all that I find quite curious is the ad personalization because even if they take your interests for this, some ads may end up being interesting or good deals. Now what I find completely inappropriate is the fact that Facebook keeps stored the people that you unfriended and conversations you’ve had with them. Why would someone want to remember old memories that don’t struck a positive impact or bring any positive energy into your live. The past is in the past and there’s no need to go back to something that didn’t do you any good or hurt you in any way. Always remember to be careful with what you search, where you search, what you writ, what you say and what you post.