If privacy was the issue with this purchase (of which its one of only a few), then the comment has relevance.

I posted it here (talk.maemo), because of the appeal to persons here of "open" services like Gizmo5 and the direction of such matters when analytics such as AdMob are attached to them in order to not only track you, but also selectivly feed you information based on a smattering of data that you may or may not know that's being collected about you. Which takes the idea of open to not just include development, but to also mean "open to create profit streams where there might not have been any."

On Google's end, they have a terms of service that you *choose* to opt into. In that ToS, they say that information analytics are taken, and they say (some) of how that information is used in order to serve you advertising and other features. What they don't tell you is any extrapolated information, patterns/conditions, or connections to other person's data - and all of that against public data sources from governments and private data sources from companies to which they have entered into agreements with.

If most of us were paying attention in history class, we would see that Google is simply repeating history, yet seemingly using the lessons learned from those that failed and had antitrust and other cases brought against them. Unfortunately for many of those that could do something about it, Google has the front and backend covered (they lobby for the public policy that people would affirm, while making money off the public information that people no longer wanted control over).

Whether its wrong or right depends on more than I want to get into. And at the same time, it exactly the studying of history that's got me going "ooooh! That reminded me of Standard Oil and a few other folks from the backend of the Industrial Revolution." To see these moves by Google and other companies, and not pay attention to their implications would be dour for this and any technological community IMO.