Jeff Bezos Quotes

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.

Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that.

Everyone should acknowledge a simple truth: The heart and soul of today's Internet economy is the collection of data, mainly for use in targeted advertising.

The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there's an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later.

What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks.

Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.

Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

The launch of Google+ apps sends a powerful signal - the personalized web has begun. What this means is that the way information is structured and accessed will turn on the individual, or rather their personal profile which is a composite of all the data collected on the basis of what they have searched for and shared.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

What's really going on is, on your iPhone, you have 200 apps, and they're all collecting a little data on you. Twitter knows a certain thing, Foursquare knows something else, my Fitbit app knows something else, my Waze app knows something else.

When you use Facebook, you're always logged in, and your identity and relationships - to others, to content, to apps and services - are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).

Over at Barb Bowman, she's arguing that we should turn off Facebook's tracking of ads. I totally disagree; those trackers make newsfeed filtering work better and potentially could help bring me better ads, which improves my life.

Google, Facebook, and other consumer web companies violate our privacy. But that's only because they have an ad-based business model. They can only make money by selling your data - and degrading the product experience with ads.

Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.

The users are not going to be in the position of accepting what's been collected; they're going to be in the position of being able to demand collection.

I believe people have a right to know what's going on with their information and how it's collected, how it's stored and who gets it.

I'd rather deal with a big company, because at least I can sue them, and see them, and know what they're doing. Google, for instance, shows you everything they've collected on you, with a clearly written privacy policy. They tell you what they're doing with it. I'm not scared by that.

I clearly say yes to Big Data, yes to greater security and convenience, but no to paternalism and Big Brother.'

People complain when ads aren't relevant, and they complain when ads are too relevant.