Don’t Google anything that enables Google to define your identity

Source: Thinkstock

Source: Thinkstock

If you’re really serious about finding a way around Google’s propensity for constructing a profile to define who you are and how much you’re worth to specific advertisers, then there’s not much recourse but to avoid searching anything that could give Google or advertisers a clue about your identity. As Jeffrey Rosen reported for The New York Times a few years ago, the privacy threats go beyond creepy ads. “Computers can link our digital profiles with our real identities so precisely that it will soon be hard to claim that the profiles are anonymous in any meaningful sense,” Rosen writes.

Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told the Times that companies can combine hundreds or thousands of facts about you into what he terms “a database of ruin.” With discrete and unconnected facts about you, an algorithm could sort through profiles of hundreds of thousands of users like you and accurately predict something unrelated about you or your activity. Ohm argues that there’s at least one closely-guaraded secret that could lead to harm if revealed, like “a medical condition, family history or personal preference,” and the database of ruin makes that secret hard to conceal.

Even if many classifications are inaccurate, they can still harm you with effects like price discrimination, in which companies profile you and determine how much to charge you for goods or services. Rosen reports, “the new world of price discrimination is one where it’s hard to escape your consumer profile, and you won’t even know if companies are offering discounts to higher-status customers in the first place.” He imagines that “As personalization becomes ubiquitous, the segmented profiles that advertisers, publishers and even presidential candidates use to define us may become more pervasive and significant than the identities we use to define ourselves.”

If you’re looking to minimize the amount of information that search engines and advertisers collect on you, there are a few steps you should take. Choose an alternative search engine, like DuckDuckGo, to keep your search history from being recorded and analyzed. Install an extension like AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, or Disconnect to protect yourself against companies who want to track your activity online. Check your privacy settings on popular sites, and always log out of social networks when you’re browsing the web.