Hospitals and health plans are increasingly using the huge amount of medical data they collect for research. It's a business worth billions of dollars, and sometimes those discoveries can be the foundation of new profit-making products and companies.
It doesn't seem like much to give up your email address for access to a web site you're interested in—after all, they're not asking for money—or clicking on a "Like" button now and then, or participating in an online poll, or…well, you get the idea.
But it is. Much. Because there are companies—some of which with names you know and others you don't—who make, literally, billions of dollars "mining" the data you leave behind, sorting it and compiling it, until some of those companies, as Apple's Tim Cook put it the other day, know more about you than you know about yourself.
And what they know, they sell. For lots.
Now, some of what they know is public information and you could find it yourself if you had enough time and money to spend. But some is private, and some is very private, as in the NPR story above.
Are you getting enough in return for it? Not for me to say.
But what I do say is this growing concern for privacy on the network is real and justified. How much of who we are do we want to let go of?
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