The Background: Consumer Watchdog created a parody video potraying Eric Schmidt as a clown who rides around giving out free ice cream in exchange for a little bit of data about each of the children. Later that week Ryan Singel fired back with In Defense of Google in Wired Magazine defending some of Google's practices.

Why Should I Care: While stories of online advertising companies extending their data gathering into consumers personal lives has been discussed in the tech blogosphere for years, they are finally starting appear in the mainstream media. The Washington Post covered the Consumer Watchdog Video. The New York Times ran an article on "Creepy" Online Advertising That Follows You Across the Web.

Looking Ahead: While Google may be trying to simplify it's privacy policy to appease the public, the Wall Street Journal spoke with some Googlers about ideas to grow advertising showing that the privacy changes might be nothing more than window dressing. Lastly for anyone looking for a counterpoint John Andrews does a nice job picking apart Ryan Singel's article in Response to A Fanboy’s Defense of Google which is mentioned here on Sphinn.

There is also another piece, on State of Search related to this issue, essentially defending Google because "well, everyone else is doing it."  I see that argument being used quite a bit and what most people don't realize when they toss it out, is that the industries that do have quite a bit of data about you (banks, credit card companies, doctors, etc.) are all regulated and fall under government purview as to their practices and policies with respect to what they do with and how they manage consumer/patient data - Google does not.

Youre off course right there Michelle (I wrote that piece on State of Search), but its not about 'see who else does it'. Its to show how little people actually KNOW about what is being stored about them. Thus the examples of banks, stores etcetera.

@BasvdBeld thank you for correcting me if I've misinterpreted the crux of your article. I read it and came away with my initial impression - not just because of your content but because generally when I've read and heard Google's data collection and privacy practices discussed, they are often married with "they aren't the only ones doing it - and you don't complain about the others...." which leaves me with what Mom always said "two wrongs don't make a right" :)

More to my point was that banks and doctors v. google are apples and oranges - because the former are regulated and the latter is not.  At this point Google, like Facebook, can pretty much do what it wants with the information everyone so willingly surrenders up. It is only public pressure that makes them behave in a given way. And I'm not saying that they should be regulated - it's just that there is a huge difference with your data at banks & your data at Google. People need to understand that as well.