# Privacy Footprint The ubiquity of technology has made it extremely hard to keep private our personal life and information. Search engines collect and retain everything we search, click, save, and share on the web. They track all the sites we have visited and our activity in those sites, as well as our IP addresses, and the date and time our search query was processed. For this assignment, I looked at my search activity on Google Chrome, and effectively, was able to see how all my search history had been saved. The browser I used, and the model of my laptop were also shown. ![](https://i.imgur.com/4PP91U8.png) In effect, our browser and hardware contain all kinds of personal information about us. Data such as our computer’s battery life and operating system can be accessed by any website, and do not require the user's permission. Our location can also be tracked: Google’s Geolocation tracks the location linked to our mobile device and reports our location history. Thus, it’s even harder to avoid leaving a trail of every place one has been, making each search term more valuable and allowing advertisers to target us more accurately. (Kernighan, 2017, p.188). ![](https://i.imgur.com/zW8gPdS.png) Social networking sites also collect a great deal of information about its users. Big tech companies like Facebook have been under anti-trust scrutiny for collecting users’ private information in unscrupulous ways. For instance, [in a 2019 article](https://newatlas.com/computers/facebook-not-secretly-listening-conversations/), Rich Haridy revealed that Facebook listened to users' private conversations to test a new transcription algorithm (Haridy, 2019). Just like the messages we send, these sites also retain the pictures we share, the posts we like and the friends we follow- information that can also be indexed by other search engines. For example, when I googled my name in Google chrome, the only picture that appeared was one I had posted on Twitter many years ago. ![](https://i.imgur.com/MFBoEis.png) Every time we use the internet, we leave an unintentional trail of data behind. However, it seems that we as users disclose a remarkable amount of personal information in return for, “entertainment and keeping in touch with other people” (Kernighan, 2017, p.193)