Serving your corporate masters, or What Price Freedom?

A new internet phone service will make this scene from Minority Report a reality -- in your own home:

As if it weren't bad enough that Google puts ads on your Gmail page based on the kind of mail you receive, now a new internet phone service wants to eavesdrop on your phone conversations so that it can play ads to you to defray the cost of the service:

Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., is introducing an Internet phone service today that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.

[snip]

Mr. Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself.

Besides, Mr. Maislos said, he thought that young people, the group his company is focusing on with the call service, are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.

“The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,” he said.

Mr. Maislos founded Pudding Media with his brother, Ruben. Each had spent several years doing intelligence work for the Israeli military. Before Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos ran a broadband company called Passave, which he sold in May 2006 to PMC-Sierra, a maker of computer chips for telecommunications equipment, for $300 million. Richard Purcell, a former chief privacy officer at Microsoft, is an adviser to Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos said.

Uh...okay. So while you have Dick Cheney asking Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities JUST to provoke the kind of response that would justify an AMERICAN attack in return, now you want me to let a couple of Israeli military intelligence veterans to listen to my phone calls "so they can sell me ads"? You expect me to eagerly sign up for a service whose founder says this:

Mr. Maislos said that during tests he noticed that the content had a tendency to determine conversations.

“The conversation was actually changing based on what was on the screen,” he said. “Our ability to influence the conversation was remarkable.”

Imagine the potential for getting people on internet calls to give incriminating information based on the ads that a consortium of Microsoft and two Israeli intelligence workers put togethr. The mind reels....