Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers
I don't understand why there is so much push back against the nebulous threats like targeted advertising. Advertising is unquestionably here to stay and it's hard to believe that people would rather have irrelevant ads to relevant ads.  I'd rather Google figure out what type of TV shows/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'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'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.