Freaky!

I'm nearly finished the cult favourite book, 'Freakonomics', by Levitt and Dubner. It uses the tools of economics to explain certain curious phenomena of society, such as why crack dealers live with their mothers. I'll no doubt write more on it soon, but one of the extract articles in this expanded edition is an extract from their blog dealing with a trip to Google. One employee asked them what they would do given the data Google owns. I would take issue with that ownership, but then we did knowingly sell Google our souls when we took their email. What struck me even before reading the article is what Levitt and Dubner, or for that matter anyone, might do with the data amassed through Facebook. Think of all those 'applications' building up all that profile data. I'm sure Levitt and Dubner would gladly give some royalties to get that. And then there are all those hungry companies.