Paranoia

So I think I've come to a realization about my internet paranoia. Ok here goes...With all the people on the internet (really think what that means, its a pretty ridiculous amount of people) there is no way that any company/government/system could store all of our information i.e. every website we go to/all our emails/our facebook/our comments/our posts and everything else we do. Maybe I'm wrong, but its just not possible to store all that data from everybody. So what do they do? They take snippets of our internet lives, and yes, they tell a great deal about us, but its not as invasive as I previously thought. Why have I come to this conclusion? Ask yourselves, what are they doing with this information? Well, for the unbelievably overwhelming vast majority of us it is purely for advertising purposes. Go down this blog and look at the Google disclaimer about how they store emails. All they do is pick out key words using computer software (not people reading) and use them to advertise to you. Ok, now you might be saying "Well its not Google I'm worried about, its others obtaining that information."...and this is where my personal revelation comes in. No matter how well protected, no matter how many laws we have, the government will always be able to track you, they will always know what you've been looking at. As far as the internet is concerned, the United States government is omnipotent, and they always will be. If your a little paranoid about the internet, the sooner you realize that the better. It doesn't make a difference how far we come in terms of rallying people for a privacy act, the government will still have access. Why? Because they feel that they have to much to lose to not keep up their omnipotence. Now I am about to go back on a a big thing I've said in class. If you accept that the government will always track you, and if you don't want to be tracked...don't use the internet. Also, on Google, I have really been thinking (and its been freaking me out lately because all my adds on facebook are freakishly relevant, I was showing Pat in class, every add on the side of facebook was directly responding to a word in my activities profile section.) I'm just not sure if I give a shit about that. I mean, what harm can come from that? I am a consumer and they know this. Is it really that invasive to have software track my habits and offer me something I may like? I think the analogy of having someone follow you around and track your habits in real life is irrelevant here due to me beliefs on the difference of face to face interaction as opposed to non (see down in the blog). So to sum up. The idea of paranoia about the internet to me is fading fast because 1. The government knows if they wish, and that will never change no matter WHAT (so why worry about it?) 2. Google and others have so much data to catalog that they cannot really invade you in the way most of us are thinking, they use SOFTWARE to pick out simple KEY WORDS that creates an advertising profile for you. This is where I will lose many because many believe that this is too invasive. I simply disagree from my personal standpoint. I just don't attribute a software as capable of judging me (I think thats what a lot of us are afraid of, being judged) so I don't worry about it. Ok so to really close, can anyone come up with a situation (besides facebook pictures popping up to discourage employers from hiring me) that will change my "who cares" argument? The only thing I can think of us down the line things coming up that political opponents/rival businesses would use against me. My only argument to that is that about 80% of the population probobly has the same sort of embarrassing shit so we are all sort of unified in that way? But maybe that is a bigger deal than I am anticipating.
-Mateo