This week’s lab mainly focus on popping our filter bubbles as discussed in last week’s lab. This week, I will choose some ways to make the action. The three popping actions that I would like to choose is using incognito pages, erasing the web history and Turn off my cookies. At the same time, in today’s lab project, I will also list some methods to prove my point.
First, I first entered the incognito mode. I found that I can’t quickly browse my history. For example, a website that I used very often in the past would not jump through the first letter I entered. I need to search the entire website address completely. At the same time, all my login pages are also invalid, and I need to log in with my account password. So to some extent, this makes my life slightly inconvenient. However, this really helped me to make the network environment better. For example, the ads that were recommended before will no longer appear on the youtube page, and there will be no very annoying ads that pop up. And facebook or youtube will also show me some pages I haven’t logged in before.
In the second step, I deleted all web browsing records. I started to browse some news on the web. I opened several big news websites such as New York Times, CNN, and Fox News. At this time, I realized that the first recommendation was not the ones I used to browse. I am a person who loves electronic products extremely, so these news pages of mine are basically opened mainly for electronic and technological news, but this time I found the most political news, and generally speaking, I don’t browse politics. News, I am not very interested in them. But deleting the browsing history can make the website no longer recommend based on your preferences, and you have the opportunity to see more content.
Next, I turned off my cookies again. In fact, I think this operation is the most beneficial to me. Although the first two operations have made the network safer, they have somewhat reduced the convenience, but turning off cookies is a thing that can make the network healthy. Because the browsing history proves your preferences, cookies are not only analyzing your data, but also researching your preferences and recommending advertisements to you. You may not need these ads at all. You will feel that your life has been tapped. So after I turned off cookies, I focused more on what I needed. After turning off cookies, ads will not recommend me particularly relevant things. I think my life is more private.
All in all, I think the past week was a very good experiment. Because I better understand how simple it is to get a person’s information in the Internet world. I hope that in the future Internet world, people can enjoy more convenience, but can protect everyone’s information security.
Meet Yulin Li 