I am comfortable with the privacy policies employed by Google and Facebook.
While I would prefer they refrain from tracking me in their community and across the Web, I understand Google and Facebook are for-profit ventures. Insight into the online activities of their users is what they sell to advertisers.
Plus, each company is open about what they collect from their users, how they acquire that information and then how it is used. Here is Google’s policy and here is what Facebook says.
For me (and millions of others), the value provided outweighs the privacy concerns.
That’s not the case for everyone though. Here is a direct mailer I received from a company called Web Listings, Inc. of Niagara Falls, New York after registering the URL marchausman.com through GoDaddy.
Let’s put aside the fact the service Web Listings offers is something easily handled for free and focus on how they’ve designed the solicitation to appear like an invoice. For the purpose of this blog post, I even had to highlight the acknowledgment that there is no obligation to pay.
I suspect thousands of individuals and businesses are duped each year into paying $85 for a service they couldn’t recall requesting.
So while I understand the constant cry from activists and pundits about Google and Facebook because of privacy issues. I sure hope more attention gets paid to the true charlatans and con artists who troll the Web.