Online Privacy

I'm sure you have been on websites like Google.com or Amazon.com searching for a certain item or topic and noticed that after you have entered your search a list of advertisements appears that relate to your search. This is due to the tracking systems that companies like this have for their customers. Amazon.com is increasing their methods of tracking what their customers buy to trace the things that their customers buy even more in depth. They are tracing items you want, items you have bought for you or other people, items you have passingly searched for as well as other things. If you go to Amazon.com and search for a book they will tell you whether or not they have that book, as well as other books by the same author and other books that you might like. Is tracking all of this information to use for advertising a security risk? Google.com has recently created its own email environment called gmail. With gmail, whenever you send an email it is automatically scanned and advertisements are listed on the left hand side of your screen. For example, if you were to send an email to a friend talking talking about which car insurance policy to get, after the mail is sent it is scanned by the gmail services and advertisements are displayed on the left on your screen that have to do with car insurance. Are features like the ones Amazon.com and Google.com provide a positive or a negative feature? They can be very helpful in finding the product that is just right for you, but do we sacrifice too much privacy to gain these extras?