More on Google and privacy concerns:
“The erosion of privacy and the intrusion of commercial spam in our lives is subtle. Like boiling a frog alive, we rarely notice how much we’ve lost until its too late. Unless we draw a line now, reminding companies like Google – which exhibit a kind of corporate Asperger’s Syndrome when it comes to privacy – of exactly what we value, then in ten years time it will be too late.”
“It’s ironic,” writes one reader, “for a company that says Do No Evil – they don’t know the definition.”
Reading this in the same week as hype about identity theft concerns bigs up ID cards. God only knows how they think ID cards will help with shopping, and for God’s sake, isn’t your private identity one of the last things you want linked with your shopping habits?
From the article:
“In a survey commissioned by software firm Intervoice, 17% of people said they had stopped banking online while 13% had abandoned web shopping.
More than half thought that the government’s proposed ID card was the best way to combat identity theft.”
And yet:
“An identity card doesn’t really help the problem of identity theft other than at the point of purchase,” he said. ”