Nordstrom.com can memorize millions of people’s buying habits in an entirely reliable manner. Those buying habits can be turned over to big brother without my knowledge (hi AT&T!). They can be subpoenaed in a legal case to indicate my moral character. Most importantly, digital buying habits can be sold, and indeed must be sold if the business possessing them dissolves with outstanding debt.

The ethics of salespeople (while questionable) are human. their ability to withhold or forget information is vast. The ethics of corporations are purely profit driven. They do not forget, and they are rarely incentivised to withhold.

I don’t think its fair to say “let’s not confuse the two.”

Search engines have a legitimate interest in collecting data to provide good customer service. Most people understand this. What they really fear is that companies are amassing huge databases of personal information (taken without adequate permission or explanation) which could fall into the hands of the government. This is the crux of the privacy debate in the EU. Let’s not forget how Yahoo! helped the Chinese government arrest a political dissident.

Not unlike third-party cookies which, in my browser, result mostly in new AdBlock rules with liberal use of ‘‘ in the regular expressions, like ‘.googlesyndication.com/*’.

BTW, what happened to comments the preview button?