Tully's Coffee: Privacy Concerns on the Web

After reading the chapter from E-Marketing, I was most concerned about agents and ubiquitous applications. Agents are programs that are released by a user, onto the Web, and can make electronic decisions by itself. Some tasks include searching sites and buying products that "conform to an individual's tastes or interests". This is a very neat advancement, but the concern is that these agents can be controlled by someone other than the user. It also leaves the personal information in your agent vulnerable.

Ubiquitous applications are things like cookies, java applets and intelligent agents that can run in the background. This can be helpful by making the web-browsing experience more comfortable/easy, but these ubiquitous applications run without the user's knowledge or control. Some websites take advantage of this and don't even bother to tell you that data is being collected from your computer. These two things are especially concerning because they can run without a user's control, and both can be placed/controlled by another user (giving them access to private information).