Google's Bigtable, Amazon's Unbox, and Questions Of Privacy

corporate hosting service downloadable movies and TV shows.

But will each company create more privacy complaints than they solve problems?

Google has made available on its web site a white paper that, essentially, bares its infrastructure - named "Bigtable" - to the world. You can read it here in PDF format. One highlight:

Greg Linden notes that Bigtable creates and stores "user profiles" by examining past behavior. And John Battelle at Searchblog asks:

Peter Rip comments on Searchblog:

What is at the core of Amazon.com's business model is selling stuff, and this past weekend the company began selling downloadable TV shows and movies via its Unbox service. I tried it, rented a feature-length movie, and found the quality on my dual-core notebook to be outstanding. The problem: When I minimized Amazon's proprietary movie player, there was another applet running and communicating back to an Amazon server. (Maybe Amazon was trying to read my Google cookie and profile. Who knows? Amazon promises it's not peaking into files.)

Still, people commenting at Slashdot had some choice words for Amazon and companies that provide malware.