Google Offering Cash For Your Cache

pigrabbitbear writes "The gradual transformation of the web into an ultra-personalized, corporate-owned social space in the cloud has raised more than a few legitimate concerns about data privacy. Google, for obvious reasons, has always been one of the top cheerleaders for this metamorphosis. Touting a fresh new privacy policy that allows data about you from all of their services to coalesce, they've recently been particularly bullish about rendering that increasingly realistic digital portrait of you that lies stuffed away in their servers. It has led us again to question: How much are we comfortable with our machines knowing about us? How much is our privacy really worth? With their new program, Google is now asking those questions quite directly, and preceding them with dollar signs. Are we all on the verge of making our own information age Faustian bargains?"

Comments

Just Might Take Them Up On It

[Lieutenant Buddha]

Let me be the first (!) to say that I would not be entirely opposed to this idea. I am not a rich man and my data is private, just not... *that* private. While I disagree with the sale of personal data on principle, in practice I am really not concerned at all with anything I can envision them doing with that information. In a word, meh.

Re:Just Might Take Them Up On It

[Zontar The Mindless]

...I usually give them more data than they want. Poison the cache with random data and let's see how they find out how they match up.

That's kind of how I feel about Facebook photo tagging. Last week I got tagged in 6 photos taken on 3 different continents.

Of course, the date and/or location were wrong for 2 of them, and I was only actually *in* 4 of the photos, which should make things even more interesting.

So... Good luck figuring that out. :)