How They Scored

Just in case you wanted to have a standard system for bragging to the internets how often you bang, now there's Bedpost , an online sex tracking tool. The rest of this post writes itself.

From an interview with a privacy expert on the Google-DoubleClick merger : There are two key elements to a profile. Most people tend to focus on the Big Brother data collection side, and that's simply taking information about a person from different aspects of their private life: their medical records, their financial records, where they go online, what they put in e-mail, who they call -- all that kind of information that can be put together to create a detailed profile of an individual. But the second part -- which I don't think people think about very much but in many respects is becoming more important -- is the algorithm that is put on top of that data and the decisions that are made [based on an analysis of the information]. That's actually an area that EPIC is spending a lot more time on these days, because if you look at such questions as which banner ads an Internet user sees when they visit a Web site, or whether an airline passenger is pulled aside for secondary ...