Privacy Thoughts

Privacy is good, right? Giving sensitive information is bad, right? It’s scary that Google knows what you search for every day, and which sites you click through from the results, right? Allowing Google to track your browsing history with its new History feature is scary, right? What if they decide to keep your information, what if they link it back to you, what if they sell it to make money? Scary, right? Even if you chose to give them this information (which, for the most part, you did), it’s still scary, right?

Well, what about:

• Phone companies who know every single call you make, and already do sell that information to marketers and other companies.
  
• Credit card companies who know every single purchase you make and have your full name and address and phone and social security number (rather than just an email address) and already do sell that information to marketers and other companies.
• Banks who have all of your financial information and could at any minute release it to other companies, or have the security compromised.
• The government who already has all of this information and loses laptops with social security numbers and other really sensitive information at staggering rates - among other, far scarier things it does regularly.

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