Thanks Martyn and Jeremy for your comments!

@ Martyn
Thank you, I will check out Ghostery. It seems like one more useful tool to protect privacy on the internet.

@ Jeremy
You raise some very interesting points here! I wholeheartedly agree that the issues of privacy need to be taken much more seriously in our public discourse, regardless of whether our data are collected from a government entity or a private business. You are right when you say that information like “likes Latin American music” or “likes winter sports” on their own seem rather inconspicuous, but the point to be made here is that over the more such seemingly useless factoids merge to create a stunningly accurate profile. This reminds me of how after the Snowden leaks people tried justify the warrantless NSA surveillance programs citing that they only collected metadata when in fact metadata (who did you talk to, when were you in what place, where did you use your credit card how much money, where did you go regularly, who was with you during those times, etc.) can potentially present a much more accurate description than the content of phone calls.
I read recently that Uber could easily infer from their user data how likely someone was for having an affair with someone (and where) simply by looking at driving patterns of people regularly driving some place in the evening and driving back home in the early hours of the morning. Knowing that some private company can so easily obtain such sensitive information feels quite unsettling for me.
I think that algorithms first discover identity but that as they become more aware of your existing identity and as they form a filter bubble for you they tend to influence you with their suggestions, possibly shaping your identity as you interact with their services more and more. In any case I think that privacy has to be protected if we want to live in a free society.

from Comments for Mihael’s EDC blog http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/mkiseloski/2015/03/07/exploring-algorithms/#comment-609
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