@Userama
Imagine you go to a free information booth at the mall and ask where to buy shoes. The person in the booth tells you where five different shoe stores are and what kinds of shoes they have and the types of prices you can expect to pay. A week later you come back by the booth and the person, remembering you and your previous interest in shoes, tells you that one of the shoe stores has a sale going on. Most people would consider this a valuable service and thank the information booth person for the information. You apparently would charge the person with an invasion of privacy when none has occurred.
In this scenario, the information booth worker has figured out a clever mnemonic device to help them remember visitors to the booth and their interests. Then, the booth worker works out an arrangement by which they can pass information and advertising along to potential customers on behalf of the stores. Of course, while they provide the information to you free of charge, the merchants pay them to help them target potential customers. This is well within the rights of the information booth worker to do since they are under no obligation to aggregate the information you need and provide it to you at their own expense. Since you gave the the information willingly by way of using the free service they provided, they are well within their rights to use that information to finance their operation and even profit from it.
The information booth worker does not need to sell your information to the merchants who would find little value in it compared to the service the booth provides to them. What would the shoe store do with a huge list of people who inquired about shoes, especially when there is little to no reliable personally identifying information about who these people are? It is much better to just pay the information booth when a customer is successfully directed to their business than to pay for and then try to utilize an aggregated list of people who "might" be interested in shoes.
In this scenario, nobody's personal information was bought or sold and nobody's privacy was invaded and most rational people would consider this to be a valid and ethical business model and a good service to have available.
Google's services, while a bit more complex in the variety of "free" services they offer and millions of people use, are no less straight forward in the terms of service of the free information booth. You use the service; they track, record and aggregate data on your usage. At no point is this an invasion of your privacy as your usage of the services they provided is the same as you telling the information booth worker that you are looking for a shoe store.
If you can find a more ethical business model to replace these free services and fill the void that would be left if this business model is too unethical to be allowed to exist then feel free to change the world as we know it. I welcome you to try.
Discussion on:
Message 15 of 1
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
