Selling the devil to your soul

The NYT explains it all to itself:

Consumers get all kinds of free services and content on the Web because they are shown ads, and media companies are increasingly showing them ads based on data they have collected about them. So, in a sense, consumers “pay” for free content and features like e-mail by letting companies collect this data about them.

Fair and balanced exchange:

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”