Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education c Google or privacy, the inevitable trade-off Haydar Jasem Mohammad Master’s thesis in Media and documentation science … September 2019 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The problem ............................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Research questions ..................................................................................................... 1 1.3 Keywords ................................................................................................................... 2 2 Theoretical background ...................................................................................................... 3 2.1 Google in brief ........................................................................................................... 3 2.2 Google through the lens of exploitation theory .......................................................... 4 2.2.1 Exploitation ................................................................................................ 4 2.2.2 The commodification Google’s prosumers ................................................ 5 2.2.3 Google’s surveillance economy ................................................................. 7 2.2.4 Behaviour prediction .................................................................................. 8 2.2.5 Google’s ‘playbor’ and future AI capitalism ............................................. 9 2.3 Google through the lens of privacy theory ............................................................... 11 2.3.1 Privacy discourses .................................................................................... 11 2.3.2 Institutional Google’s privacy rhetoric .................................................... 13 2.3.3 Privacy issues in Google search ............................................................... 14 2.4 Google’s creepy line ................................................................................................. 14 2.4.1 The location creepy line ........................................................................... 15 2.4.2 The personal data creepy line ................................................................... 16 2.4.3 The creepy line regarding collaboration with the NSA ............................ 17 2.4.4 Gmail’s creepy line .................................................................................. 19 3 Design and use of methods ............................................................................................... 20 3.1 The convergent design method ................................................................................ 20 3.2 Content analysis ....................................................................................................... 21 3.3 Statistics ................................................................................................................... 22 3.4 The participants ........................................................................................................ 23 3.5 Ethical consideration ................................................................................................ 24 3.6 Limitations ............................................................................................................... 25 4 Results .............................................................................................................................. 26 4.1 Presentation of data .................................................................................................. 26 4.1.1 Demographic analysis .............................................................................. 26 4.1.2 Google services used by the participants ................................................. 28 4.1.3 Privacy awareness .................................................................................... 29 4.1.4 Familiarity with the personal data Google amasses ................................. 33 4.1.5 Users’ perceptions of exploitation ............................................................ 39 4.1.6 Users’ assessment of Google .................................................................... 42 4.2 Data analysis ............................................................................................................ 48 4.2.1 The relation between users’ privacy awareness and the age .................... 48 4.2.2 The relation users’ privacy awareness and gender ................................... 49 4.2.3 Reading the privacy reminder and privacy awareness ............................. 50 4.2.4 Privacy awareness of Gmail users ............................................................ 51 4.2.5 Gmail users’ familiarity of providing Google email contents .................. 52 4.2.6 Google should compensate its consumers, produces or prosumers. ........ 53 4.2.7 Willingness to pay for Google search and users’ roles ............................ 55 5 Discussion and interpretation of data ............................................................................... 57 5.1 Privacy concerns ...................................................................................................... 57 5.1.1 Privacy awareness .................................................................................... 57 5.1.2 Describing Google’s privacy policy ......................................................... 57 5.1.3 Changing default privacy settings ............................................................ 58 5.1.1 The storage of cookies .............................................................................. 58 5.1.2 Collaboration with American security authorities ................................... 59 5.2 Familiarity ................................................................................................................ 61 5.2.1 Familiarity with identification data .......................................................... 61 5.2.2 Familiarity with email content ................................................................. 61 5.2.3 Familiarity with location data .................................................................. 62 5.3 Users’ assessment of Google .................................................................................... 63 5.3.1 Google’s mission ...................................................................................... 63 5.3.2 ‘Don’t be evil’ and doing the right thing .................................................. 64 5.4 Exploitation .............................................................................................................. 65 5.4.1 Consumers, producers and prosumers ...................................................... 65 5.4.2 Perceiving exploitation ............................................................................. 66 5.5 Qualitative data analysis ........................................................................................... 67 5.5.1 The overall impression of Google ............................................................ 67 5.5.2 Why is Google is evil? Why not?............................................................. 68 5.5.3 Doing the right thing ................................................................................ 71 5.5.4 Descriptions of Google in users’ own words ........................................... 74 6 Summary and conclusion ................................................................................................. 79 6.1 Users’ familiarity with the data Google collects ...................................................... 79 6.1.1 Users’ familiarity with things they create or provide ............................... 79 6.1.2 Users’ unfamiliarity with the location data Google gathers ..................... 79 6.1.3 Users’ familiarity with the data as they use Google services ................... 80 6.1.4 Users’ familiarity with the data Google collects from its partners .......... 81 6.2 Privacy awareness .................................................................................................... 81 6.3 Exploitation .............................................................................................................. 82 6.4 Users’ assessments of Google .................................................................................. 83 6.5 Summary of qualitative data .................................................................................... 83 6.6 Further studies .......................................................................................................... 84 List of tables ............................................................................................................................. 85 List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... 87 Works cited .............................................................................................................................. 89 a. Appendix – Questionnaire Norwegian ............................................................................. 98 b. Appendix – Questionnaire English ................................................................................ 104 c. Appendix – The coded themes of question 23 ..............................................................
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