It appears that a real battle is raging on issue of online privacy. But is there any debate needed on this issue? After all who would want to someone in their house watching what they are doing? Taking your data (whether you know they are doing it or are living in perception that they don’t really do that) and analyzing it just seems wrong. Imagine having someone bending over your shoulder while you surf the internet. And each time you would for example read a news about political situation in Thailand he would offer you a ticket or to book you a hotel. Does that seem normal to everyone?!? That must be the case, because they are already doing it. While this kind of behaviour may be considered only as annoying, collecting data to connect with services is not such a simple thing. As someone put it – imagine you are looking for a book on cancer and your insurance office gets that data? Would they still give you your usual bonus?
Why do they collect all this personal data? They say it is all meant only to help us. True it could be used to help a user, but it could be also used to abuse. Point is it’s simply not a safe thing to do. Besides that, why do you need to give your age, gender, race and home address just to read some extra news? Does that seem a normal thing? Or is that extending and strengthening the control over individuals and their decisions in virtual worlds?
And if you ask me – no they don’t have the right to monitor what I am downloading, no they don’t have the right to monitor what programmes I run on MY computer, and no they don’t have the right to look over my shoulder while I surf the web. Period.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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3 comments:
So you think google and its AdSense should should be banned?
It is one thing to collect data on "some unidentified user" and totally another thing to keep the user's personal data. If you have personal data you can connect the two, but you shouldn't have the option to do so. AdSense is based on what your topic in the page is and not on user or his personal data per se (except in the gmail, which is indeed problematic from this point of view). If i am watching a page on cars it doesn't need my name, gender, race, marital status, age etc. only to give me an add about cars.
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