If you’ve created accounts at places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, NetFlix, etc., is it ethical for companies to come to those sites, copy all the personal profile information, cross-reference it across different accounts, and then resell it to advertising and marketing firms? What a company did this by connecting some “anonymous” account you had created on a site with some other account where your profile is clearly you, thereby destroying the anonymity you once had on the other site?
The 22 October 2010 episode of the radio program, On the Media, covered this problem on “data scrapers.” If you’re looking for a research question, this topic is rich with possibilities.
