What's your Facebook political preference?

If you stated your political views in your profile this might not be as interesting, but regardless you should take a look at what Facebook thinks about you.  Click the little x in the top right corner of any ad in Facebook, select "Why am I seeing this?", then "Manage Your Ad Preferences."  You'll get a variety of categories that Facebook has decided that you're interested in.  For me,  under "Lifestyle and Culture" was listed US Politics (Moderate).  Accurate enough I guess.  More so than my supposed interest in sign language.  Apparently Facebook not only collects data from your activity on their site, but if you have Facebook open on one tab of your browser it can track what you're doing on the other tabs.  Do I find this alarming?  Not really.

I recently had a conversation with some friends from the Bay Area who had both worked for a few different start-ups and tech companies and were in-the-loop you might say.  One of them mentioned that they had considered trying to get on at DropBox.  I shared my view that DropBox's days are numbered with both Google and Microsoft offering similar services with much greater storage capacity (at last check DropBox only offered 2 GB for free).  They replied that DropBox was trying to create a niche where they offered the most secure online storage..so secure that you should feel comfortable storing anything (tax documents, J-Law photos, etc.) in the cloud.

Maybe that would be a selling point for some, but I think most of us are comfortable having some secure files stored locally and then having very little expectation of privacy for everything else we do/store online.  And in a way I'm comfortable with Facebook and Google knowing everything about me.  They are Leviathans that provide as much security against outside snooping as is likely possible, and they aren't the government.  The primary purpose of their data mining is to hit me with ads that I might be interested in, and to keep their services free.  They aren't going to put me in jail or audit my tax return based on my political preferences.  So keep on trackin' my friends.