Comments on: Google’s unhealthy cookie habit

By: johncabell

johncabell — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:55:30 +0000

@ tangogo68 Actually, the TV analogy doesn’t really work well — even if you are a Nielsen family. It’s one thing to be part of an audience, especially when the audience is a extrapolation of a small subset of homes which are self-reporting. It’s another to have your every move monitored and logged. Google and Facebook (et al) don’t just need members — ie, an audience. They need that audience to share, not just show up. To me, that is a huge difference and a business model unique to these times.

By: newsfreq

newsfreq — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 03:40:42 +0000

I share John Abell’s concerns. Sometimes I am enthusiastic about the intent and constraint of Google and Obama with huge government files and expansion; other times I am quite apprehensive about what happens now. I feel I went thru a common evolution with these guys to the present–that they have SOME restraint. What happens in the next few generations, as less scrupulous folks share the same access to fantastic amounts of data about everyone… I bet already the dossiers on all the #Occupy folks around the country are thicker than phone books. And as for you…and your children… and what they wrote on Facebook at the party last night…

By: DDavid

DDavid — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:51:45 +0000

I really don’t think that the majority of individuals care because they cannot fathom the amount of data collected, nor what the impact may bring in the future.

The irony is; We live in Utopia and trust everything else but our own neighbor, but we don’t care about him either. In short it makes life easier and sweeter looking, Be Happy – Don’t worry, all while the clock ticks.

By: IanKemmish

IanKemmish — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:12:09 +0000

Maybe they simply figured that anyone who genuinely cared about these issues already had one of the at least three ad-blockers available for Safari installed?

By: tangogo68

tangogo68 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:24:55 +0000

I seem to remember a thing called free-to-air television, that operated along the same “uniquely digital-age” business model — the viewers were the product, the consumers were sold to the customers.
Of course the constant profiling done by Google and its competitors is much more pernicious and increasingly pervasive — it is nasty, it is nefarious, at least for those of us who value the sovereignty of the individual, and the fact that in the future we may wish to change our attitudes, change our beliefs, change our minds, change our selves (that is, those of us who try to personally moderate the monopolistic tendencies of the search engine industry)

By: OneOfTheSheep

OneOfTheSheep — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:20:15 +0000

Very, very well put. Some cookies today are almost immortal; like the “bad penny” you can’t get rid of. Some sites’ place electronic spies on your computer that “phone home” when you connect to the internet, and can conceivably spy on what you do while you’re not and then forward that information in a quick “burst”.

A “consumer” can’t “opt out” if they can’t tell when their activity is being monitored. We are not given a voice here, just as we were not given, initially, a voice in unsolicited telephone sales calls.

Our “right to privacy” has ever been an ever-expanding challenge, but nobody promised easy. There must be an agreed definition of “privacy”. There must be some hard and fast limits as to what may and may not be done without our permission.

Whose job is that of all the bureaucrats we pay for, and is their task and responsibilities clearly defined? If not that needs to be a priority or there will be no privacy left to protect. Big Brother will be here!