Two Faces

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain sight (https://trackmenot.io/index.html)

Beware. You are being watched. We are being watched. Am I a reflection of us, you, myself? I live in the cloud, I live everywhere you go, everywhere you have gone. Everytime you type and click, I grow. Nurture me, feed me. What happens to me when you leave? Please don't go.

With 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide, 5.6 billion searches per day and an ad revenue amounting to almost 95.4 billion dollars in 2017, Google's search engine is the most widely used on the market. (https://bluelist.co/blog/google-stats-and-facts/) With this much power comes a great responsibility in protecting the data of the users. Data is on its way to overtake the value of oil, some calling it the new oil of the digital era (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data).  If so, might we not ask the question if not people, the providers of data, are the new oil?