NPR reported yesterday that Charter Communications, an internet service provider, is planning to start monitoring its users internet activity in order to push targeted ads to its customers. In case you are wondering, yes, this is scary as all hell.
Corporations and the government have long been disturbed by the altruistic and open structure of the net, and they’re having a hard time locking it down to make gobs of cash. Their halting and half-hearted attempts to bring the Internet back under the warm feathers of capitalism and the police state are enumerated here on Infowars.com in a shrill and ill-informed article about how the bastards are going to shut it all down by 2012. Fat chance.
Still, companies have gotten pretty good at coming up with tons of ways to get us to fork over our personal information for ad targeting – Facebook, MySpace, G-mail, etc. I’ve decided to radically alter my Facebook page with random interests, just to see what ads they’re going to throw at me. Stay tuned.
