My guess is that, it is about flogs again.

As I understand it, some of those diet (and maybe teeth-whitening) campaigns are actually signing up the customer for an ongoing “subscription.” So that, each month, the credit card they submitted on the first transaction is charged again, and they receive another bottle of product in their snail-mail.

The problem there is that the customer may have thought s/he was just ordering one bottle, one time. And didn’t see the fine print about the ongoing supply (and charges.)

And, it is viewed as one component a generally sleazy big picture. Because those campaigns are also related to fake celeb endorsements, fake photos of fake results, and positive reviews by fake bloggers. Thus resulting in that recent FTC ruling about all blogging endorsements.

And the sleaze goes bone-deep. Adult sites have been using that tactic for a long time. The customer is sold a, “trial” for $3.95, (or even for “free” with the card number as an alleged age-verification) to look at the naughty pictures. And then is surprised to find a $29.95 charge the following month. With deliberately poor customer service when trying to cancel.

In fact, AOL was accused of such practices back in the 90s (maybe more recently?) Where those ubiquitous “25 Free Hours” disks could turn into subscription with serious hassle to cancel it.

As usual, the sleaze-bags degrade things for the rest of us who try to act legitimately.

OTOH, all of that has nothing to do with behavioural tracking.

I am extremely curious about the briefly mentioned, “little discussed relationships with web browsers such as Opera and Firefox which report back an enormous amount of data to Google…” What’s that all about? I thought that, the big danger was cookies and toolbars(?)