# Privacy footprint
## My phone number on Spokeo
## Webkay:What every Browser knows about you
*Comment: The search result on Spokeo shows my current location is East Wareham, MA which is wrong because I'm in Boston all the time. Then, I notice the Webkay says "If you are on a mobile network expect an error of up to 50km". Thus, it seems like my information in browser is not that correct. Also, my phone number is not a family plan, and my families are in China (they are not served by at&t). So it is interesting to see that I have 5 relatives in Spokeo.*

## Discussion for two readings:
Facebook’s recent big move is to change the company’s name to Meta, then some people say that Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple: Make America Great Again. These Internet companies have indeed brought us information and convenience, but we have overlooked what we have been taken away.

Search engines are the source of a substantial quantity of data collecting since the content you have searched, the webpages you have browsed will be saved in the database. Meanwhile, through your computer’s IP address, search engines can know your specific location. The same rules apply to social media, take Facebook as an example, Facebook can know your gender, political leaning through the post you like. Then, the potential risk is your personal information will be sold to advertisers, and advertisers bid for the display on your result page. Finally, advertisers will provide you with personalized advertisements according to your location and other potential desires, and those advertisers pay money to the search engine based on how many times you click on the ads. It’s not scary to have a search engine that tracks you. The scary thing is that you cannot be sure if your personal information will be sold by advertisers for the second time (Kernighan, 2017).

An illegal industry in recent years is credit card fraud. The real case I know is that some Chinese restaurants will use modified POS machines to duplicate customers’ card information (name, card number, expired year, and CVV) when customers check out. The information on these cards will be sold to criminals, and Criminals will use your card to shop online for other buyers, and only charge 50% of the original price. If your personal information on the Internet is sold, the consequences will be comparable to card fraud since search engines, such as Google, always record your card information and your billing address. For the problem of the search engine keeping our bank card and billing address, it provides us with convenience because when you shop next time, you can choose the default card directly. But on the other hand, you are exposing your privacy. Just like Kernighan (2017）says, the benefits that the Internet brings to us are in exchange for our privacy, and if you want to avoid these risks, then private browsing or incognito mode are a good choice since they can tell the browser to clear cookies, history, and data when the browser session ends.

Many people, including me, often find that advertising on social media is a topic we have just discussed with our friends. However, this is not valid. According to Haridy (2019), The test is to “place an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy in a room, then play an audio loop of pet food ads for 30 minutes a day, over three days”. After the test, no pet food ads appeared in any apps. Also, there is almost no difference between the audio room test and the silent room test in terms of data consumption, battery usage, and background activities. However, researchers have discovered that your phone can track you in other ways. One possibility is apps will automatically take a screenshot of your screen activity and send it to a third party such as an advertiser. Overall, social media has countless channels to monitor your activities. They can know who you have been with or what you bought recently through your geographic location, and then send you targeted advertisements (Haridy, 2019). My thought is that as we accept the benefits of the Internet to our lives, we need to accept these potential risks. In recent years, there have been more and more privacy policies. I believe that the network environment will be optimized and safer. My further question is Meta has Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, whether it can monitor users’ activities more accurately since these three apps have different functions?