Unwelcome Gaze - Vladimir Mitrović
Google’s ads are almost impossible to miss unless you’re using an ad blocker, and virtually any question you have or research you’re working on begins by visiting google.com. Gmail is also widely popular, and even if you’re not using it yourself, chances are that the person you’re in correspondence with does, thus making your e-mails land on Google’s servers Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours, Benjamin Mako Hill, 2014. .
Facebook’s social network dominance is obvious – it has more than two billion active users Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 2nd quarter 2018, Statista. , dwarfing Twitter which has “only” a quarter billion. Instagram has around a billion users, but guess what, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. Facebook’s social graph is the biggest and most accurate map of human relationships in existence, and it’s privately owned by a corporate entity. Further, Facebook’s “Like” button is tracking your web browsing activities simply by the virtue of being placed on a web page you’re visiting You Probably Don’t Know All the Ways Facebook Tracks You, David Nield, Gizmodo, 2017. .
It’s easy to overlook Amazon’s omnipresence on the web, since to most people Amazon is – oversimplification warning – a webshop. What doesn’t catch the eye of non-technical people is their Amazon Web Services offering, which is providing more than 40% of all cloud-based hosting in the world Cloud Market in 2018 and Predictions for 2021, Sky High Networks. . So chances are that the website you’re looking at in that other tab is running on Amazon’s network of servers.
