The high cost of free email

Introducing a new blogger, Paul Sachelari, Esq. Paul is the AAA’s legal counsel and will (hopefully) sneak away time from his busy schedule to occasionally write for us. –Steve

I was reading this article in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day, and it raised some serious issues regarding the insidious nature of advertising in the internet age.  You see, though you may not realize it, yahoo is gathering tons of data about you while you navigate the series of tubes which make up the internet.  Naturally, the Chronicle article is business-oriented, and extols the virtues of being able to target marketing to people more directly.  Yahoo will use information about your previous web searches, your location, demographic data, and other information to hit you with focused advertising.  This is in addition to Google’s Gmail service which scans through your emails in order to serve you up with advertisements tailored to the content of the email.

However, in a great understatement, the article’s last sentence is “He noted, however, that advertising based on Web sites collecting data about users raises privacy concerns.”  Hmmm, collecting vast troves of highly personal data which can be then sold to the highest bidder raising privacy concerns?  Ya think?