How would you feel if you were looking at a web page, your phone goes off and you see an advert about an answering machine? Then you are watching the Simpsons on TV while browsing, and you get an ad on a page about a Simpsons DVD? You might think that would never happen, or perhaps you are just (un)lucky? But no, Google is going to start something like this…

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, said in Technology Review that they have a new idea, to use a PC microphone to record a small (5 second) segment of your background noise, send it to a (Google) server, and then return a relevant ad.

Of course, Google will almost certainly be saving this data, along with our emails, search queries etc…

And because it is Google it probably won’t get listed as Spyware but personally I think this is just as bad as most other spy ware programs.

More on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/?