[Phanuthier]

Yeah, I believe Google scans through your email and picks off key words and posts subsequent advertisments for them. Don't you ever wonder why Google is worth as much as they are? Where does their money come from? Obviously, they are an internet advertisement company, they make their money like TV commercials and newspaper advertisements. Here, same thing, what makes Google sexy for online advertisements is that in your account, they are able to target specific advertisements to your activities.

As somewhat of an hopeful entrepreneur, a few others and I had an idea of a product we wanted to take from R&D to market, and we were skeptical of IP issues since Gmail does scan through our emails, and we weren't sure if our IP would be considered to be released on public domain, or how confidential it was, so we had to talk in code for our potential product to hopefully avoid that issue. However, I'm told by a Google private contractor that any info or IP you sent via Gmail is considered confidential and your own. I was also told by the Google priv contractor that the US government wants Google to release info of their users' emails for "national security" but Google said no.

Beyond Gmail and other online tools that gather data on you, data is gathered on you everywhere else too. Safeway cards, probably even Mastercard and Visa to see where you spend your money and when, and that data could be worth alot of money to some companies.

I started to wonder when someone would take advantage of this. I used to think Safeway was using those Safeway cards to track info on which areas were buying what to target specific sales, and if one day, they'd have their safeway deals as pop ups for specific area codes based on the demand of a certain product.