Sunday, December 05, 2010

If Google acquires Groupon they're absolutely insane

There's a rumor that Google is going to acquire Groupon for a zillion dollars.

I signed up to see what it was about. Naturally I used my mail.yahoo.com junk email address - a disposable digital identity. (If it ever annoys me too much, I will destroy it and create a new Yahoo persona.)

Groupon is a service that sends you spam. You can't opt out of the spam. Oh, and you can never leave. There's no obvious way to delete a Groupon account.

If Google buys Groupon then I will begin disentangling my data from Google. It will be an incontrovertible sign that they've gone off the rails.

1 comment:

RobinR said...

You seem to be discounting the possibility that Google might "fix" Groupon.!?! Or even drop the service while keeping Groupon's data.

But can the organization that claims that users can trivially opt-out of Google's data tracking (by simply not using the Internet) ever by counted on to "fix" an intrusive technology?