Personalization and Privacy

This article talks about websites personalizing their websites for their customers. The big site this article talks about is Amazon. Before this article I never gave much thought to just how much websites like Amazon or Facebook, or any other website knows about me. For example, I see things I look at on Amazon showing up not only on Amazon suggestion lists but also on sites like YouTube. The article talks about how these sites use algorithms to track exactly what a user is looking at and for how long. With these algorithms they can personalize every other site you go on. It brings up the question though of how much information is too much when they are gathering all of this data? I feel like websites taking all of this information could be helpful but only when I'm looking at that information on the appropriate site. I think a real problem occurs when information starts spilling over into other sites. The article does go on to talk about the Platform for Privacy Preferences project, which is designed to be integrated into browsers to let users easily manage relationships with each of them and identify what types of information they are willing to share with each. So with this you could make it so only certain pieces of information are gathered by websites. Using this could help keep what you want private out of the algorithm equations. Overall I think websites using personalization has the potential to be quite useful, however there does come a point where its just creepy to see things show up that you looked up on multiple websites.