As a millennial, my upbringing was this strange in-between regarding technology and privacy. I remember using Netscape, MSN Messenger, Ask Jeeves, Bing, and waiting literally over two hours for the 2-minute Finding Nemo trailer to load. I was definitely raised to be careful online, as I remember my parents getting scammed in the early eBay days. As I grew up--2000s in junior high and high school in the San Francisco Bay Area--during the meteoric rise of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook; I knew OF these great tech companies, but news of them never dominated my life, or honestly even broke through much of the noise that high school itself creates. But I grew up with everyone giving the internet their data to the internet and I was no different. Posting everything on Facebook, 99% of everything I have ever searched for has been with the Google search engine. If I stop and think about it, they likely know an alarming amount about me. But that's such a norm. But should it be?
Stop Taking My Data!
Sign up using my Presearch Referral Link and I think you'll get something? (Hint: Money)
In college I finally bought myself a smart phone and I quickly downloaded all of the social media apps; Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Google+ (lol, just kidding), and Twitter. I now know that these are data consuming machines of companies. Everything about ME as a person is ingested, and then, in some way, used against me to keep me on the platform. Is it actually good for my life to share this information with them? I'm a little older and wiser now, I am not obsessed with keeping up on any social media, and that which I do share is much more limited than before and this is because I'm more wary of how these companies will use my data and how trustworthy they are. A part of me would like to request all of the data these companies have on me, like how a patient has a right to have their medical records and I believe that if these companies want to continue to evolve, they must take a serious look at how they take our data.
Presearch vs. Google
Me To Presearch
At the moment, PRESEARCH is not up to my search engine standards, but, to be fair, I've only been using it a few days and I've literally been using Google for twenty years. There have been multiple times I've been unsatisfied with the search results and have typed in Google.com (I'm using Chrome, but I've got the Presearch Chrome Extension that makes makes it automatically search with Presearch) to see if I can find better results. Presearch is slower, not crazy slower, but definitely slower than Google. And the results are not as But I have to remember the real tradeoff that I'm getting: speed and "better" results for privacy, data protection, and I'm getting paid. Not gonna lie, it's worth it for me. If I only have to do one out of every twenty searches on Google now, awesome! Eventually, I'm hoping that the growth of companies like Presearch might nudge big data consuming tech companies to reconsider their business strategies; because you know, do we really need billionaires? No. We don't. I don't think they really help the world.
Educate Yourself!
There have been lots of other smart(er) people who have written about Presearch over the years and I think it's important to read diverse points of view! They've come a long way!
Techcrunch
Steemit
Wall St. Journal
And the hard-hitting journal CryptoPotato
If you want privacy and to get paid for your search, consider signing up using my Presearch Referral Link.
You After Reading This Post
tl;dr: Millennial cares about data, as long as alternative is being paid, lol.
