Spy on yourself online

Article


Strange as it may sound, though, soon you may be spying on yourself. Why would anyone want to do that? Entrepreneur Seth Goldstein, whose startup Root Markets aims to create a financial market for consumer data, offers a compelling reason.

"Everybody else is spying on me," he says, "so I want to spy on myself."

But Goldstein wants a better copy of his online behavior than anyone else has, and he wants to have complete control over who gets to see it. Instead of spyware, he calls the software that will let him do this "myware."


You want to spy on yourself, and keep a copy of it all...why ?

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are trying to collect as much information about you as possible. Whenever you sign up with them for a service that requires a password (such as e-mail, My Yahoo, or personalized search), you are laying the groundwork for them to one day track your behavior across different parts of the Web through your online identity. If this information is so valuable, why not collect it yourself?


Ok... so you're collecting it yourself ... to do what ? Sell to advertisers ?


With these principles in mind, Goldstein hopes to bring advertisers and publishers into the mix and create a market for consumer data.


Yup. To sell it to spammers.

Lemme get this stragiht. Your brilliant idea is for me to keep track of my own movements, with your special software (that I doubt you're giving away for free) so that I can sell it for a few pennies (one persons tracked info isn't worth much , but 10 000 peoples info is... it's all in the numbers) to some yahoo's who will fill my email inbox with spam and make my life miserable ?

The hole in this system is, as I mentioned, numbers. On person's "click stream" as you call it , is worth almost nothing. Only when you have tens of thousands of them and you can play a numbers game with them , then do they become worth something. Thus me selling you my information is a waste of time. I'll get what , 5 cents per month , maybe less ? Forget it. Not worth the time I will spend clearing out the extra spam in my in box.