With all the talks and posts and whatnot about privacy on the Internet it’s easy for anyone to turn into a privacy control freak.

And I really was starting to freak out myself. After all, a good bunch of my own life is on the Net: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, this blog, all the Google applications and all the other services I use, or I test… But this morning I received a letter, not an e-mail, a paper letter. From Google AdWords. Sent from France. In German!

I guess they just assumed that since I was living in Switzerland I was talking German, like when ebay.com redirects me to ebay.de, but I don’t speak nor read German.

And it reminded me something I learned a long time ago, when I was working for Singularis – a now defunct start-up that was collecting users preferences about TV programs: You can collect as many data as you want, if you don’t know how to use it it’s only worth the cost of the storage.

And the more you have the harder it is.

Image Credits: Michell Zappa