Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide: The Online Privacy Issue

When Google announced its Gmail email service two years ago a lot of people figured the company was joking. After all Google had been known to offer up the occasional gag like saying it was starting a research center on the moon. More importantly nobody believed that consumers would tolerate Google’s plan of scanning people’s emails and then delivering advertisements to them based on the emails’ contents. Two years later Gmail has tens of millions of users. But consumers’ initial disbelief underscores the web’s knotty privacy problem according to participants at the recent 2006 Wharton Technology Conference. Consumers say they want privacy online although they often behave in ways that contradict that statement; companies insist they will protect privacy although they sometimes fail to do so. And everybody is wary of increased government regulation.

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