En Español Solamente - Not so fast Google!

I made an interesting observation today. In my Intermediate Spanish 2 class we have to pair up with another student to complete un actividad comunicativa. We were provided with a base worksheet, website links, and overall topics to be covered in this communication activity. Using Zoom, one of us had to setup a meeting and record a 20-minute conversation between the two of us in Spanish. This week’s activity had to do with searching websites of Hispanic schools to talk about the school menus.

Since the chapter we are on discusses Spanish foods, our assignment was to look over and compare two different Spanish school menus to find words from our vocab list, find words not on our list but that were easy to tell what they meant, and then find words that we had to find the meanings for. The whole time we were recording, we were supposed to be speaking entirely in Spanish. We, of course, were also looking up some of the Spanish words on Word Reference as part of this activity. This was an allowable part of the activity, so long as we were speaking in Spanish.

Then we had to look up menus of schools in the United States to find similarities and differences between the Hispanic and American school menus. My partner looked up her childhood school menu, and I looked up the menu of a local elementary school in Davenport. We both observed mostly healthy menus but noticed that American schools had far more food choice options than the Spanish schools. But that wasn’t really the most interesting observation that sparked this 500 Words blog post.

After we finished our actividad comunicativa en español solamente, I checked my email on my Gmail account. At the very top of the email list was an ad from Google Fi - a piece of spam email that was completely in Spanish. Even that was not the most interesting part of this story. Later, after I’d done some other online Facebook, Instagram, Google searches and class work in English, when I went back to my Gmail account again, this SAME email from Google Fi was completely in English! (Obviously I don’t clean out my email box very often.)

How does that happen? I know it’s a fairly common thing to have your Google searches show up as ads on Facebook. It’s just how it is. And I know there are privacy actions I can take to reduce that from happening, but I’ve never really thought much about it. I didn’t feel that it was all that important whether Google shared with Facebook that I was searching for an Emily Dickinson coloring book – which resulted in ads for coloring pencils.

I’ve never really researched or thought much about the effects of that type of information sharing between platforms. I know it has something to do with algorithms or some other thing I don’t understand much about. But when I saw an email in Spanish solamente, that then changed to an English-language email the next time I looked at my Gmail…. I didn’t really know what to think. But I do think that it couldn’t hurt to re-think my privacy settings. Pienso que está un idea muy bueno.