http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304159304575184270077115444.html
Birds of a feather flock together. Or, in the Internet age, a customer's friend is a potential customer.
Embracing those truisms, some big marketers, including Sprint and eBay, are turning to small start-ups to help them tap social-networking data to find would-be clients among the friends and acquaintances of existing customers, to the dismay of some privacy advocates.
It then turned to New York-based start-up 33Across, which analyzed data from social-networking sites to map out the connections between the customers eBay had identified and other Web surfers, in order to serve up ads at the right time and place.
http://www.dotrights.org/lawmakers
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the federal law that is supposed to be protecting our digital privacy, was last updated in 1986 when Ronald Reagan was President, mobile phones were bigger than your head, and the World Wide Web didn’t even exist. A lot has changed since 1986. Why hasn’t electronic privacy law?
https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=2153&autologin=true
How many of Google's products and services do you use? Gmail? Google Docs? Google Checkout? Blogger.com? Chrome? Picasa? Chances are, you use a fair few Google services. Which means that Google knows a worryingly large amount about you.
To find out just how much, head to http://www.google.com/dashboard and log in with your normal gmail/Google account. You'll then be able to see all of the data that Google holds, all in one place. From the number of messages in your mailbox, to the most recent it
em you bought via Checkout, or the most recent picture you shared on Picasa.
Now, tell me honestly that you're still not worried about the IT industry's continuing relentless move to cloud computing!