When it comes to my privacy and yours, I think that we are all screwed. This last week in the news the story about Google and their “street view” cars has resurfaced. As one of these vehicles drive down the street they would harvest any data off of anyone’s home network that was not secure. Not to mention what was captured by the cameras. “Google insists that the data sweeps were “unintentional” and that they were only viewed a very limited number of times.”(http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1876720) The thing that I find interesting is that that is exactly what Google is in the business of?
Also Microsoft is guilty of doing the same thing. Microsoft just released their product “Kinect”. What it does is enables multiple video games participators to interact with their Xbox without the use of any controllers. It captures your movments via a special web cam that sits on top of your TV. The issue is that it sends pictures back to Microsoft. You can only imagine what they are doing with those pics, right! “Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE do not use any information captured by Kinect for advertising targeting purposes.”(Microsoft) We can only hope.
