Yahoo/Inktomi Privacy Worries

from the grudge-match dept

It seems that David Lazarus has some sort of grudge against Yahoo. In the last few weeks he's been writing all sorts of anti-Yahoo articles, and his latest seems to be going a little overboard. I'm certainly not a huge fan of many of Yahoo's practices, but now Lazarus is really reaching for reasons to dislike the company. He says that their recent purchase of Inktomi could possibly (just maybe) lead to questionable privacy practices by Yahoo. I had to think about this for a while to understand what the "threat" is here. Basically, he's saying that if you happen to search for a book at Amazon.com (which uses Inktomi's search engine), later on, when surfing at Yahoo, you might (gasp! no!) see an advertisement related to the book you searched for. Why hasn't the FTC been alerted? Seriously, I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is here. If you're so worried about such a thing, then use some sort of anonymous surfing program. Don't complain about some possible Yahoo effort to serve up some targeted advertising.