It is human nature - we love getting stuff for free. We love getting free stuff so much that we either don’t see or don’t care about the strings that come attached with all this free stuff. At the center of this freeconomy of course is the ever growing Google with more free products under their belt than just about any other major corporation.
Yes we have had free stuff available to us for almost as long as we have been trading goods among ourselves. In most cases the old adage of it’s only as good as what you paid for it has been used to signify that free products usually meant crappy products. Then along comes Web 2.0 and the Google revolution of freenomics which generally raised the quality of the free products to almost good enough as the stuff you pay for.
The attitude being that we are willing to accept products that just get the job done but don’t come with anything to make the product really stand out other than it is free. It never fails these days that any web service that comes along has to be free in order to get any kind of traction at all. In turn though for those almost as good as products we are being required at some point to provide more and more of our personal information. Along with that - especially in the case of social networks like Facebook - we are for all intents and purposes signing away all our rights to any of our data that is either added to or created on these services.
Now according to a post by Mark Evans ISP provider Charter Communications is experimenting with what they are calling enhanced online experience which is short form for conducting deep packet inspection of all of your traffic that flows through their pipes. The principal behind this plan is to be able to provide advertisers with incredibly detailed customer usage patterns so that they can fine tune their ads even more.
In short the deeper companies like Charter can get into your every move on the web the more money they can make from selling that information to advertisers. While not mentioned as a part of this there is no denying that this type of snooping on your data traffic will also allow them to monitor your activities online so it isn’t any stretch of the imagination as to how much that information would be worth to groups like the RIAA or MPAA or even law enforcement at all levels.
Of course I can hear the moans of who cares there’s no privacy on the net anymore (bullshit - the only reason there isn’t is because we’ve been willing to sell it off for free stuff) and so what does it matter.
Well like Mark I know one way that Charter could sell this idea hook line and sinker - offer up free broadband access. After all we’ve pretty well given up everything regarding our privacy so far for free email and a bunch of other just as good applications so what does it matter if we give up everything so we can get to all that free stuff a little faster.
Conversation Tags: privacy, security, free stuff
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