We'll Never Sell Your Personal Information. Unless We Need The Money.

Pretty soon the whole house of cards that is the Internet Bubble 2.0 will come crashing down.

When it does, we'll finally get an unambiguous view of what a fetid pile of crap the whole ad supported web has been.

In addition to the fraud, criminality, and corruption that are the everyday life of the web, last week we learned of two other facts that reinforce the belief that we can never accept anything that anyone associated with the ad supported web tells us.

Revelations about the amount of data web publishers collect has led web publishers to assure us that our data is safe with them and that they "respect our privacy."

A piece in The New York Times last week reveals that, like so much else they tell us, this is complete bullshit. The Times did a study of the top 100 sites in the U.S. recently. Here's what they discovered:

"Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred"

The Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center had this to say...

"...companies make representations that are weak and provide little actual privacy protection to consumers...”

Or as the Assistant Attorney General of Texas put it...

"...we are never going to sell your data, except if we need to..."

The second revelation was about Google. Google, of course, makes its money by misdirection.

Instead of directing you to the most relevant answer for your inquiry, they direct you to the company that pays the most to "own" the term you are searching.

We have been led to believe that once we got by the misdirection of the first few Google results -- that are the product of "paid search" (which is just a euphemism for advertising) -- natural or organic search would be free of misdirection and would give us an unbiased answer. More bullshit.

An article in The Wall Street Journal last week reported...

"New research by two U.S. academics suggests that Google Inc. is harming Internet users and violating competition laws by skewing search results to favor its own services"

The article cites a study conducted by two prominent American academics...

"The study’s authors—Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Tim Wu of Columbia Law School—found that users were 45% more likely to click on results that were ranked purely by relevance, rather than as Google ranks them now, with its own services displayed prominently."

The ad supported web is currently headquarters for the world's sneakiest little bastards. Almost everything they say is untrustworthy. Only a fool takes anything they tell us at face value.