Every online service needs to make money ('if the product is free, you are the product'). But people do not expect/want to pay for online forums.<p>I'm rather pessimistic about online privacy. My wife's family is Jewish. The Germans were very successful wiping out Jews in The Netherlands, mostly thanks to the fact we (the Dutch) kept track of religion in city records. Jews have become very privacy-aware here, but it needs to get this bad before people finally understand the dangers.
We need more articles like this, we need a flood, until all the non-technical people in my life take their privacy more seriously than they do at present.
By and large, the main product of the Web industry is the user. Content or code that is sold as a property or a service is used to lure in the product (the user) and sell the most-commercially viable aspect of the product (that is the information about their "categories") to the highest bidders (advertisers).<p>Is it too much of a stretch to say that this mode of user-segregation-and-information-selling is pretty much a new form of "commoditization" of human beings.
Quite a long article, with different types of monitoring methods and scenarios mentioned.<p>In the end, we can only do so much to <i>shield</i> ourselves.<p>Granted, we can and should stop posting personal/sensitive information all over the internet (even on supposedly private forums), but with new and improving tracking technologies (both in the virtual and the physical world), we cannot have total control over our privacy.
> <i>Google has developed Glass, tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses that allow people to take photos and videos without lifting a finger.</i><p>I know this is tangential to the article and probably not something the author thought a lot about, but this is my little pet peeve. Google did not developed "tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses" - those you could already buy for years anywhere for cheap. There's a whole plethora of surveillance tools anyone can buy on-line or even off-line in "detective stores". Cameras hidden in glasses, pens, buttons - you name it. Cameras you wouldn't notice if someone talking with you was wearing.<p>What Google did develop is a wearable HUD, which is an awesome and potentially very useful piece of technology. Technology that was apparently halted because the only thing people noticed was the camera. They complained because they noticed. This is, IMHO, stupid.