SiliconBeat

Last week, privacy advocates went into a tizzy over the ruling by a New York judge that YouTube must turn over all its data about which videos that its users watch to Viacom. The latter is suing YouTube, which is owned by Google, over copyright infringement.

It’s a reminder, of course, of what lies at the heart of the Internet. In essence, companies like Google have turned the Internet into a vast collector of personal data which they then use to figure out how to get us to watch, read or buy more stuff. The amount of knowledge a company like Google has about your personal Web surfing habits would likely boggle your mind if you knew the full extent of it.

But the outcry left me wondering just what everyone was so worked up about.

Read the rest of this entry »