Part 2: Critical reading
Read the text again and answer the questions that follow.
Mind Control and the Internet
By Sue Halpern
A. In its inaugural days, the Web was a strange, eclectic collection of personal homepages, a kind of digital wall art that did not rely on mainstream media companies or corporate cash, and was not driven by commercial interests But then commerce moved in, almost by accident, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the duo who started Google, reluctantly paired small ads with their masterful search engine as a way to fund it. It was not their intent, at first, to create the largest global advertising platform in the history of the world.But that is what happened. Write the word "blender" in an email and the next set of ads you're likely to see will be for Waring and Oster. Search for information on bipolar disease, and drug ads will pop up when you are reading baseball scores.
B. Targeted ads may seem harmless enough after all, if there is going to be advertising,isn't it better if it is for products and services that might be useful? But to pull you into a transaction, companies believe they need to know not only your current interests but what you have liked before, how old you are, your gender, where you live, how much education you have, and on and on. There are something like five hundred companies that are able to track every move you make on the Internet, mining the raw material of the Web and selling it to marketers. That you are overweight, have missed a car payment or two, read historical novels, support Republicans, and spend a lot of time on airplanes is not only known to people other than yourself, it is of great monetary value to them as well. So, too, when you are and when you've bun, as we recently learned when it was
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