Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers
I don&#x27;t understand why there is so much push back against the nebulous threats like targeted advertising. Advertising is unquestionably here to stay and it&#x27;s hard to believe that people would rather have irrelevant ads to relevant ads.  I&#x27;d rather Google figure out what type of TV shows&#x2F;movies I might care about and only advertise those to me.<p>And if they want to aggregate large amounts of data about internet browsing habits to get a better idea of the types of customers which want certain things, I see that as only a positive since it helps steer businesses in the service of their customers. Data mining large sets of browsing history does this in an incredibly non-intrusive way.<p>I&#x27;m all behind auditing the data being used and sold for identifying features, but the cases where this has been a real and serious problem are sparse at best.  The most serious threats have been successful hacking attempts releasing data which isn&#x27;t controversial for them to collect.<p>That is, people are worried about Google telling Capital One your IP address is in the market for a credit card while hackers are walking out the back door with hundreds of thousands of social security numbers, names, addresses, and credit scores.