In The Age of AI- Blog Post 10

 In the Age of AI

The movie "In the Age of AI" is horrifying, it really opened by eyes to what privacy means and how little of it I actually have. I always make a joke about how my phone is listening to me and how my FBI agent is going to arrest me one day, but those might not be jokes and I just did not know. 

I want to analyze this movie from the end. Towards the end of the movie Alastair Mctaggart explained a conversation he had with a friend who worked at Google about privacy. His friend told him "You would be horrified if you knew how much we knew about you." This line really scares me because how much do they know. Do they have a file with my name on it with every website I have ever been to, every item I have purchased, every text I have ever sent? What else could Google know about me? As a 20-year-old, I have spent more than half of my life using the internet and Google so what could be so interesting about me?

One thing that Google might be able to use with my information is figure out how to persuade me to do or buy certain things. Google has admitted to using their platform to change people's views on voting, so why does this matter? Google has also figured out that they are able to persuade people without them even knowing it. This matters for my life because I have shopped at the same places my entire life and I am now realizing that I do not even get ads for stores that I do not go to.  Google has been able to keep me at the same stores my entire life simply because they are the only things I search for and it does not give me any other options. Does this happen for other things? Does Google pick what I do, where I go, and what I buy? 

All of these conversations are terrifying and the more I think about them, the less I want to use technology. However, technology is so important to everyday life, it would be impossible to function without it. All in all, most websites I visit are stealing my information, and I just have to be okay with it.