But it's user-specific advertising, right?
I mean, it's evolved, and I know it's evolved, because I get ads on my browser that are specific to, you know....
I'm a hunter, and I go to hunting sites and fishing sites, so I get stuff from Bass Pro. I get all kinds of stuff all the time. That's not a surprise. I know how it works. That's fine. I appreciate it. This isn't meant as a criticism, and I'm not going on attack mode here.
I am concerned simply about the privacy aspect of it. I've been a database administrator. I've looked after millions of dollars' worth of financial transactions. It's been my responsibility to look after data. I'm pretty sure about what I'm talking about. But I've never done it in a social media context. Everything I've done has been private, financial transactions and whatever the case might be in a corporate setting. I understand what you're doing here.
My issue is that I've got constituents who are also users of your services who would have legitimate concerns about their privacy. If you want to talk about the technical aspect of cookies and how those things are tracking.... I know what a cookie is; I know what a secure socket layer is; I know what SSL technology is. I know these things.
So when we're talking about local versus centralized, you would be gathering the data on me as a user. Just because you're not tracking a cookie on my machine, or putting a cookie or a log history in, you would be able to know if I logged into any of my Google accounts. If I were logged into Gmail or if I were logged into anything, you would be able to record that browsing history, not maybe to the infinitesimal point where that data is being stored with my name associated to it in your database. That's where the value comes from your data collection, is it not?