Last week, I used GMail from a computer that allowed all the adverts from Google. So I’ve read around 50 emails which exposed me to maybe 250 adverts. To my surprise I ended up clicking on probably 15 links that were interesting to me. The interesting bit is that the links were not related to the content of the email, but somehow the datamining that Google does, payed off because the links were interesting to me. After around 3 years of using Gmail, Google Reader and all the other services it seems that I am a very open book to them. I was trying to anonymize my broswer habits using different Firefox extensions but I am not sure it’s worth the effort anymore. As long as I am using Google Reader and Notebook, I have a cookie from Google for as long as the session is open. For the time being the cookie is sweet and I will enable the adverts in Gmail. I am not sure if in the long run I am at ease with this “lack of privacy”. I know it was my choice and in my case an educated one.