Recently there has been a lot of talk and confusion over Google apparently tracking everything that you do online.  News agencies have been telling us that our "personal information is not safe" and that we need to stop using Google and move to another search engine or service.  But before you do so you need to understand what is really happening, and what the news agencies are not telling you.

To give you a little backstory, everything that we use that is free on the internet costs someone money.  Most likely it's the website that you are using that foots the bill for all of the free services.  You may not even realize it, but there's a lot more out that that you may not even realize you're using that is costing someone money.  If you use a web-based email (i.e. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, etc.) that is a free service that you use.  But every time you check your email (or even by justing have an email address on that server) you are using a computer somewhere that someone has to pay for.  You're not paying for it, but you're benefitting from that computer being connected to the interent and turned on.  If you watch videos on YouTube you are connecting to a web server that has mass amounts of hard drive storage space.  Someone bought those drives and put them into the server, just like you buying a hard drive at Staples, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc.  The only difference is you normally only buy one drive, but web hosting companies buy hundreds of drives at a time.

The second thing that you don't realize that you are using, but you use everytime you get online, is the bandwidth used to transfer the data from the web server that the site is hosted on.  The cost of bandwidth is an enormous expense to any popular website or search company.  YouTube serves over 1 billion page views per day and an estimated cost of (some estimates vary) $174,000 per year.  That's how much it costs Google just to let you watch free videos on the internet.  Facebook users enjoy the free online social media giant at a similar cost of $183,000/yr.

So how do these companies afford to pay for the huge costs associated with all of the free stuff they let us use?  By putting various advertisements on every page we see.  And to help them generate even more revnue from these ads, all of these companies are expanding the service to offer ads relevent to what you are looking at, interested in, or buying from verious web sites.  So, if you look at shoes online you're going to notice that you see a lot of ads for shoes and footcare products.  If you search for deals on Disney vacations you're going to see ads for Disney brabded kids books, toys, clothing, etc.  Recently I did a search for trailer hitches for my wife's Jeep Grand Cherokee.  Now I'm seeing ads for trailer equipment everywhere I go.  This is called target marketing, allowing these website to show you ads based on what you are most likely to be interested in.  So if you're of the older generation, instead of seeing ads for video games you'll maybe see ads for various healthcare products for your age range.  If you're a woman you might see ads promoting feminine hygene products, where if you're a man you'll see ads promoting power tools.

Now for the question...how do these sites know what I'm interested in, or if I'm a man or a woman?  Is somebody looking at what I type into my web browser or spying on me?  The answer is no.  All of this information is collected by every website that you go to, and is stored in a database.  That information is then ran through a program that picks out key words and matches it to keywords built into the various ads that you see.  No single person (or even a group of people for that matter) could ever sift through the tremendous amount of data that is collected in a single day, or even a single hour.  There are litterally billions of searches done by people all over the world.  Sites know where you go online, and what products or items you look at, because they have ads on almost every webpage you go to.  Google ads are all over the place.  Facebook ads, the "like" buttons you see on sites, and "share this" buttons are everywhere you turn.  Truthfully, the only way to not be "tracked" is by not using the internet at all.

Leo Laporte, one of the most prominent names in technology, summed it up well in his explanation that recently aired on his weekly radio show.  For those of you who don't know of him, Leo has been reporting on the tech industry since the early 80's, and has assembled a massive online network of podcasts and technology shows.  He is the former host of the ScreenSavers show that used to air on former TechTV broadcast station.  He is very well-known in the tech industry, and respected just the same.  Click the play button below to hear the audio clip where he talks about this subject in episode 854 of The Tech Guy radio show.

Leo Laporte on Google

So are we being tracked?  In one sense of the word yes, but not how you think, and certainly not how the news agencies are portraying it.  The media has an agenda, and that agenda is to keep their ratings up.  What better way to do this then to get everyone up in arms about their privacy and/or their personal information.

The real problem is not what a website does with your information, or how they collect it.  The bigger problem is that people think that their information is private.  If you use the internet, especially any of the social networking sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) your information can be made public without you knowing.  Facebook has taken a lot of heat over the way they constantly make changes to the privacy settings on your account.  And they aren't the only ones who do this.  The best rule of thumb that you can live by is this...if you put it online make sure it's something that you wouldn't be ashamed of if everyone in the world knew.  At some point in time everything that you put out there will be made public, even if you have it set to be private.