Online privacy is now the web's new hot commodity. Over the next few years, we can expect more companies to start making money out of it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that companies like Microsoft Corp and McAfee re rolling out new ways to protect users from having their movements monitored online. Some companies are selling privacy protection services or services that block online monitoring. Others, like Allow Ltd offers to sell people's personal information on their behalf, and give them 70% of the sale.
All this makes perfect sense. Companies are collecting highly personal details about Internet users. Stuff like their online activities, political views, health worries, shopping habits, financial situations and even, in some cases, their real names. They feed all this information to the online-advertising industry now worth billions of dollars. We are living an age where people will have online privacy concerns. As more and more of our lives are lived online, it becomes a bigger and bigger market.
The question is whether any of this will stop people worrying about their personal information being sold off. You can bet it won't. The information will still be sold. It's just that the privacy fixes will be making some folk very rich.
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