Personalization vs. Privacy
It seems that the internet has collected enough information on all of us to successfully read our minds without typing a Google search! I was just reading about another interesting technology (Solariat) that reviews questions in social networking conversations and identifies conversations elsewhere on the web that might have an answer - Look, no search!

Everyone I know tries hard to maintain their privacy: What should be my facebook settings?, etc. Organizations worry about how not to cross the line with their customers. The fact that each one of us has a different "line" for each question makes the decision very hard and complex. Any generic decisions applied across a large number of consumers are bound to not satisfy anyone.

One answer would be to give a user an easy enough way to control their "lines". However, marketers (read $$) seem to have more sway over the privacy decisions at internet sites than the non-paying consumers. Did you read who won when Microsoft was evaluating default privacy settings in IE (wsj article)? Why am I not surprised?

The pic has nothing to do with the post ... a couple of interesting wines we tried recently ... sharing a bit of personal info :-)