>About Whatsapp: The European Commission is currently finishing a report about Whatsapp's way of collecting data. And their advice will be to forbid Whatsapp to do it that way. They esp. criticize the fact that Wapp also centrally collects phonenumbers of all people in your adressbook who not yet have a Wapp-account. Wapp's reaction is that they are only meant for the U.S., not for Europe, and any claims must be dealt with by the Californian (I think) court. A big lie, because they have translated their app even in Dutch and they also have a Dutch website.The same is true for all our other languages over here.

The bigger issue here is that this is yet another death of internet... because there was no good way to make money on it from the start. Someone mentioned last year how there was some initiative in HTML2 or thereabouts to have some kind of payment tag, but the bankers stopped that, they didn't like a flow of money they didn't understand (and didn't know how to control). So the way to make money on the internet was, for a long time, to sell ad space. Now we're in some nth iteratio of the process, and there still isn't a simple way to do so. Even when someone has a great idea and finds a way, someone else will copy it, offer it for free and sell ad space around it.

The current iteration is practically perverse, when compared to the original problem: it's about gathering private data to pass to the highest bidder, be it an advertising spam plant or NSA.

Why did I say death of internet? What makes internet interesting is not just the commercial websites, there are also lots of private websites with original content. Those often offer interesting content, and aren't technically demanding, so they can be hosted pretty much anywhere. Also, there are many places with member-supplied content - forums, galleries, collective blogs - where the authors of the content are not paid.

The worrying trend, which will make internet a poorer place, is that many of these start as good ideas, gain some following, accumulate content, even feel like a tribe... and then sell. They practically sell all that unpaid content.

It happened with Geocities (Yahoo started inserting ads when publishing members' pages). With Panoramio (Google now forces members to unify their identities with their gmail accounts - you figure out how much info is now in one place under the same account... I deleted my hundreds of photos when I've had 750000 views, just for that). Skype used to be impenetrable and simple to use - now it's to be handled with care.

I know I've grown very watchful over what I publish on the web. What I publish on my own may not be seen by too many people, and may not get very far. But what I publish on a friendly public site may end up in unpredictable hands, and more often than not, hands that I deem dirty. So I probably won't.