MOLI VIEW™

Amid all of Yahoo's problems – the merger talks with Microsoft, the board of directors drama, the declining stock price – the company finally did something right. On Friday Yahoo announced that it will offer consumers the ability to opt out of being tracked and having ads served to them accordingly. I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, but I'm going to give up Google.

Of course, Google has so much information about me that the company probably knows that already.

And, of course, Yahoo's decision may have less to do with looking out for users than it does with a letter written to Internet companies by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee that asked what information they tracked. But it's a start.

It's not enough, though. Most customers don't know how much information search engines collect about them, much less how it will be used. And we all know what Google's privacy policy is, from comments made by online pioneer Vint Cerf: "There isn't any privacy, get over it."

I've heard many smart people make the same argument – that technology will make privacy a thing of the past. In another variation on this argument, this is actually a good thing, because that transparency will engender confidence.

I don't buy this. As I've said, people who talk as though technology is the engine of history remind me of people who used to talk as though class conflict were the engine of history – smart, but too blinded by ideology to examine the issue. Nothing is inevitable, and we don't have to use every technology we invent. (People used to talk as though the invention of the atom bomb would lead to all-out nuclear war, but that notion now seems absurd.) Rather than allow Google to make important decisions about our society based on their bottom line, the government should step in and act in the interest of the entire population. European countries do this all the time, albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness.

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