Companies are getting rich from selling both the mundane and the intimate parts of our lives, and Congress is doing nothing to stop them. On June 11, the Washington Post described in a first page article how less than reputable companies are offering the details of our investments and bank accounts on the World Wide Web. In addition to our demographics and business transactions, technology now enables more and more monitoring of our activities. Automated toll booths can now record every time we pass through the toll gate. Cookies allow web sites to track our movement from page to page in the virtual world.
Employers can monitor our email exchanges at work.
The reason is simple - money. A lot of companies are discovering, if they own the transactions, it's just a wealth of data sitting there. The amount of money that is made from selling information about a single individual may be small, but combined the figures are quite staggering. Computers make this aggregation possible and profitable. With the growth of the Internet, this amount has assuredly grown much more.