Nearly every action you take while online is monitored by advertisers, from the products you buy to the links that you click. Ads are tailor-made for each and every user, like a more accurate Pandora, but without the music. Despite all of this, people are still more concerned about hackers accessing their private information than they are about advertisers paying for it.
AllThingsD shares the results of a survey where 75% of respondents say they are worried about the threat of hacking, yet only 54% have the same distress when it comes to advertisers tracking their every move. Only 15% rank government’s breach of privacy as their top security concern. What this shows us is that sensationalism trumps common sense.
The threat of being hacked is very real — just ask anyone who has ever had to regain access to his or her email account — but the seemingly innocuous gathering of information by advertisers is both constant and extremely invasive. It’s possible that f the public was better informed about how their information was stored and shared, this survey might have seen very different results.
