Internet Privacy

The latest big technology news is the so-called privacy breach in Facebook. Apparently when you have been playing Farmville, or Mafia whatever, the people who run those games have had access to your information on Facebook, and may have sold that information to others, so that they can market to you. How much information that is seems to be hard to determine, but at least they know your name and/or e-mail address.

My father worked for a number of years for a company called Names Unlimited. Their only function was to amass lists of names and addresses of people who had previously bought things from mail-order catalogs, and to then group them by their apparent interests, location, or whatever, and then sell those lists to other people who were interested in marketing through the mail. In so doing, we all received a little more "junk" mail, but the cost of First Class postage was pretty cheap, because the US Post Office was making a mint off of all the junk mail that they carried. Well mail-order has mostly gone away, to be replaced by online shopping, and as a result the cost to mail a letter has gone up from .25 in 1990 to .46 in 2011.

I guess my point is, if you want to play the games on Facebook/Myspace/whatever for "free", then you should know that there really is nothing that is "free", there is always an angle. They aren't spending money on programming all of this stuff just so you can waste time at work, there is always an ulterior motive.