Big Brother Through The Backdoor?

The proposed data privacy law seeks to give government agencies worrisome powers

- R Srinivasan

The other day, after reading an article on the importance of having medical insurance, written by one of this paper’s knowledgeable personal finance writers, I was alarmed enough to search for potential medical insurance options available to someone approaching retirement. Within minutes, my personal email id had been bombarded with pitches from various insurance companies and aggregators. More alarmingly, I soon started receiving unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers hawking various insurance plans. All this, literally within minutes of reading one article related to the subject, and a single Google search: “medical insurance 60 years”.

This happened a couple of weeks ago. Even today, while researching for this piece, most of the ads on the websites I visited were pushing either insurance or air tickets (Christmas is coming and I had also been looking at options for a short break)!

So let’s look at what happened. My browsing history is clearly not private. Yes, I was doing this at my workplace and my employer (or rather, my employer’s IT admin) had a right to know what I was doing with office provided resources. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is how all the other entities who have taken to plaguing my life got hold of my personal information.