You have to be exposed to advertising (there is nothing you can do to avoid it), so your option is to receive advertising that is relevant to you or advertising that is not.

100% of people would prefer advertising that is relevant to them.

I guess I think of the early 90′s when people were so paranoid about revealing their identity on the internet and how far we’ve come from that. And it’s because really the risk of something happening is so small and we all realized that. There are so many different people out there, posting, sharing all this information.. and not that many criminals just sitting around figuring out how they can use the fact that your status update says “going to get lunch with friends” to mess up your life.

If you’re that paranoid, and you’re doing something on the internet you don’t want other people to see/know about, maybe you should think about not doing it. The idea of a HIPPA-like regulation is ridiculous. Especially in cases when you’re consuming web services like Facebook that are free of cost.

The technologies being developed to conduct these analytics and the data gathered can be applied in so many other world-changing ways… particularly in health care, evaluating causes and trends of illness and disease, etc..

Just something to think about…

Your lumping two different types of organizations together and calling them data miners. The news media does this all the time, so it’s not really you, it’s where your getting your data from.

Credit Bureaus, these are the ones with your social security number, and your financial information. They get all their data from your creditors not from the web.

Advertising cooperatives are the ones who are tracking your buying habits. Other than bad debt, fraud and maybe credit score, your financial data isn’t very interesting to them. They get their data from the tracking cookies in the ads they distribute and from the members of the cooperative. Things like your social would be of no interest, they don’t even care about your first name, they aggregate the data based on your household.

A number of these cooperatives also have separate departments (or even companies) that are selling on line advertising. They use a tracking cookie that can tell them when your computer account has surfed to a page with one of their ads, and they can also tell if you click on that ad. Because some vendors provide the tracking cookie information to them, they can link the cookie to your name.

Neither of these groups would want your passwords.

When you said: “Retail chains, big and small, track what sells and why. To me it would be a simple matter for those companies to sell that information to manufacturers without impinging on anyone’s privacy.”

You actually described fairly accurately what the advertising cooperatives are doing. Except I’d use the term vendor since it’s not just retail stores. And I think most of their members are pretty large.

They act as a middle man, making sure that vendor B never get’s a hold of vendor A’s actual data, protecting the data is one of their primary responsibilities. It’s only used to identify names that might be of interest to vendor B based on your buying habits with other members of the cooperative and sometimes the data they have harvested based on your surfing habits.

It’s also used by their on line advertising departments to decide on which ad to show you.

The tracking cookie only works on sites that are displaying their advertising so they don’t know “all” about your surfing habits and the only purchasing data they have is what their members have provided. Most vendors are probably not members and many sites do not have their advertising. So coverage is spotty at best.

Not sure what in that information would be useful to the government. Google search engine data (what you searched for) and your Facebook data (profile, friends and feeds) would be far more interesting to the Government. I’ve read that they’ve made attempts at Google, and it frankly wouldn’t surprise me to find out they already have full Facebook access. So I think their are more important things to worry about.