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Friday, June 29, 2012

A Digital Life Means No Anonymity

We seem to mind less and less that we are being tracked.  Our movements, our likes, and yes even our reading habits are being analyzed over and over again.  "The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading."  And yet for the convenience of e-reading, we seem to be okay with being tracked.

Now the argument is always that all the data is aggregated and that individual usage remains anonymous, but one has to wonder for how long.  The need for targeting may start out wide but eventually it will begin to move to the individual.  Should we be paranoid; probably not.  But we should be able to opt out.