@ 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.

I really liked the Verge article you shared here too: ‘Here’s how well Google’s search engine knows you’. I do think these privacy issues are really important, and will become increasingly so, however I couldn’t help thinking about how simple some of the ‘results’ of this profiling seemed. ‘Winter Sports’, ‘Latin American Music’ – those don’t seem very specific, and nor are they defining characteristics, are they? But perhaps the algorithms will get better, and ever more detailed profiling can take place.

Nevertheless, I think there is an important theoretical point to raise here about identity: whether it is innate and waiting to be discovered (by algorithms, for example), or whether it is constructed (by society, for example). The ‘Google Gender’ category in particular got me thinking about this. So, does an algorithm ‘discover’ a gender that was already present, or are our actions subsequently categorised as either ‘male’ or female’ according to agreed societal norms. The first example in that article seems to show how algorithms are involved in the construction of gender?

I wondered if you might want to reflect on some of these issues further. Is privacy premised on the idea that we have core innate characteristics, unique to us, that have to be protected? And if identity is constructed, rather than innate, does that mean we don’t need to worry about privacy?

Nice breakdown of your YouTube activity here too!