iPhone? That's old. iPhone 3G? That's a little bit new. An almost free phone where you do not need to spend a single penny browsing the internet with unrestricted open source software for download, gPhone? That is hot!
Yes, everything free is good, but how come it is free? This is where market and advertisement rolls in. That's why Google, the creator of gPhone; could provide those services for free. The big companies invest in Google, specifically gPhone, because they could see a new market for their merchandise, the phone browser. Since gPhone would display advertisement from time to time when the user browses the internet, the user would read the advertisement at some point. But that would not be enough to convince the companies to invest.
The data obtained while internet browsing. That is what the companies want. With this valuable information, and the help of Google, they can further slim down their advertisement to specific user so that the advertisement is effective. But, this breaches our privacy. Why should they know what are we looking in the internet?
This may not seem much of a bother to many of us, since they only want to know what websites we go to. Wrong! When the companies do know what we like to do, we might get bombarded with annoying advertisements and even spams. At least, they should have our permission to collect the data from us.
This is consumer panopticon. The extortion of our personel data, whether in what form it is in, is a violation of our privacy. And in most cases, we do not even know that some of our information is collected. Imagine that if I were to surf the internet a lot about sports car using the gPhone. Next, I could get banners of add on top of my browser, the next thing I knew is that I get spots car magazine delivered weekly to my doorsteps. We, as consumers, should take a better care of ourselves. The next time if any company ask our contact information, make sure that we think it out thoroughly whether we are giving unnecessary information to the company or not.
1 comment:
I do not believe it is information extortion if the buyer knows what they are getting themselves into. The gPhone is a great deal, I would definately buy it, even though I know everything I do with it would be monitored. That is the price you pay instead of money. I would even click through the annoying advertisments if it meant I was saving $50 a month. Additionaly, if the advertisers knew my preferences I would only see things that I would potentially want to buy anyways. And if I ever wanted to search for anything embarrassing
I would be sure to use my friend’s gPhone instead so no one would know it was me. But if I am aware of the monitoring, I do not think it violates any rights. I have chosen to be monitored essentially. I could have picked a crappier or more expensive phone, but I chose a nice one for less money. In my eyes totally worth it.
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