Its out of control... Re: Not so fast
"people don't seem to value that data, that information, about who they are, where they are or what they do - or not very much."
I believe they do, or would if they knew the extent of tracking undertaken by these Internet giants. The fact that much of this is done (effectively) by stealth, or "permitted" by terms buried deep in the T&C muesli rather undermines this argument.
-=-
I have to agree with you that its not a question of our valuation of the data.
Its that we don't have control over the data being captured.
Suppose you're like me. You don't have a FB account.
Yet unless you install a script blocker in your web browser and stop certain scripts from running, if you visit a site that FB has an agreement with, FB would now have data about you and will build a profile about you.
Same for Google.
So I may choose to avoid using a service from FB or Google, yet they still capture information about me. And here's the rub. A company may not sell or have a contract in place to share this information, but that they may do so because their IT guy grabbed some code that embedded scripts from FB and Google.
And it gets worse.
Google analytics.
Its a catch-22.
Google uses data collected from these tools to help do page ranks so if you're El-Reg, you might want to take out the google analytics code. But in doing so, you may no longer show up in their web statistics.
Which hurts the site so that they have an economic reason to run google analytics.
But from an end user... we have no control over the capture and sharing of this information, regardless of the data protection laws.
Again the point is that sites may unknowingly be sharing data w Google, FB, and others without knowing it because they don't audit their website's javascript.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
