In these days, I found a very interesting phenomenon when I view two Chinese websites called Weibo and Taobao. Weibo is a famous Chinese microblogging website, which is used by over 30% Chinese internet users and has 503 million registered users at the end of Dec 2012. Meanwhile, Taobao is the large website for online shopping in China with more than 50% market share.

The interesting fact is that every time after I search a product in Taobao, I can see lots of ads about this kind of product I just searched in Weibo. This kind of situation never happen before so I try to find out the reason for this. It is easy to found out the reason online that Taobao just brought 18% shareholding of Weibo. Both companies call this decision as the strategic cooperation. This makes me worried about the security of data we left on these websites. At the same time, I do not think it is ethical to exchange these data among companies and use them to do the marketing.

The main reason why I think this kind of marketing behaviors is unethical is that all these data belongs to customer themselves. Without customer’s permission, companies cannot give them to others or even sell these information. I admit that companies can use these data to analyze customer’s potential interest trend. However, they cannot show the exactly record for each customer. In case, it is obvious that Taobao give Weibo the information of what I just searched. It makes me feel quite annoying. In the future, if lots of internet companies share their information with each other, they will know any details of my online activities, which is terrible for us.

Thus, in my opinion, all these kinds of behavior should be supervised by government. Otherwise, People cannot have any privacy when they view websites in the future.