Fred Davis is CEO of Lumeria , a company that aims to give consumers control over their personal information assets and the means to profit from their sale. That's a lot of assets. Davis speculates that RealNetworks may have been getting ready to sell their customer information to someone like BMG Music Club, and not informing its customers ahead of time was no accident. He said it was only using the data in a cumulative way, to track things like the fact that 20 million people have recorded CDs with the software. Hardie added he doesn't think the music industry will necessarily be as aggressive about data collection as other Internet business categories since consumer confidence is key to music sales.
Some sites are even willing to pay cash upfront for the right to track Web surfers' movements.
Green Witch tracks people through Web server logs, where there is an IP address for every file that the user looked at. But he said the company would never sell that information. They can uncheck the option if they want to. In exchange for their data, the user gets five recommended tracks per day, which helps them wade through the mass of music content. Mudd said the company will never share people's personal data with others, but it does report the general demographics of customers gleaned from surveys they fill out.