Worrying about privacy still seems to be in vogue doesn’t it? I hear people getting paranoid about identity theft and what information ‘agencies’ are gathering about them. But really folks, what does it all amount to?

As regular readers and followers will know I subscribe to the ‘if you are innocent then what is there to worry about?’ school of thought and really see the whole movement for data collection is an ‘infringement of human rights’ to be in the same camp as the ‘don’t let children experience failure’ brigade. I line them up and shoot them, publicay, one at a time and charge people to watch

Anyway back to the main track of this blog – new media and technology. The above outburst was prompted by a post on Nikki Pillington’s twitter feed, which obviously took me to the real article via her blog (god you have to love these SEO types!!). The real article being a post on SEOmoz about how much data Google captures.

Of course in real terms it is insignificant – but I am sure that it will help to fuel a few tortured souls into further paranoia.

Now if you really want to worry about something – it’s your ISP that you should be concerned about. For instance BT. An ISP can track EVERYTHING that you do online, sites, text input, when you did it, how long you did it for… everything… I hear the ignorant cry out JUST LIKE GOOGLE. Not quite, your ISP can link this activity to you as an individual – because they hold your billing records. Now that really is valuable ‘consumer insight data’. How much do you think an ISP can sell that data for?

But don’t get me wrong, I still don’t care or worry about it. If you are legal then what is there to worry about? So people can target their marketing better. Well that would be an improvement on getting generic marketing that I have no interest in. At the end of the day if someone can predict what I am interested in and offer it to me how on earth can that be a bad thing?

So I say again – what is the problem folks?