posted a piece about GMail that I overlooked, though many blogs I read referred to it. But it’s just the title that’s misleading – the piece itself is excellent. O’Reilly’s The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus is about MUCH more than the privacy concerns, it’s about the whole thing that GMail represents. “Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn’t one computer — it’s a hundred thousand computers, by report — but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming.”
Yuck:
It’s funny that at dinner
the other night with Aaron, Caterina, and Stewart, we were talking a bit about TiVo. We don’t have it here, so I wanted a confirmation that it really was what I thought it was, and then discussed some other aspects of it, in a very general fashion. At one point, Aaron mentioned that it was obvious they were doing something with their data, even though we all knew (or suspected) that they denied it. The other three of us – we pretty much just assumed that he was right (at least that’s my recollection) and didn’t discuss it further. What’s to discuss?
Anyhow – to make a long story just a little longer – it seems that our assumptions/instincts were correct.
Freedom:
Freedom: Zero Knowledge Systems – I mentioned them earlier in the week – they are shipping software that pseudonymizes your travels online. Good idea. The real, “sticky” traffic on the web is social traffic, which can’t be pseudo. Hmmm.
Interesting:
I recently opted out of Doubleclick’s tracking system through Privacy Choices which is supposed to take care of this for us. And yet, just now, when I went to CBS MarketWatch, I got an E*Trade Canada ad. How would DoubleClick know that I’m Canadian?
