John Eligon for the New York Times reports on Google’s new fiber network:
>The company also has offered people in wired areas the option of obtaining a free 5-megabit-per-second broadband connection, but they will have to pay a $300 construction fee.
The overall pricing on Google Fiber seems cheap to me for the speed they are offering, but I have long been a critic of an ad company being in charge of my access to the internet. I don’t think Google will inject ads, but why wouldn’t they build deep customer profiles based off of what they know about you and your internet activities. Whether you have “nothing to hide” or not, this is a big deal.
Think of it this way, if Google asked to follow you for a day and record everything you did, would you let them? I’m not saying you even get anything for free, just would you let someone follow you all day, record what you did, and potentially — maybe — sell that information to someone else. Would you do it?
Now the free internet access is even more concerning to me than the paid, but I think both would offer such privacy concerns for me that I would feel *better* about staying with Comcast — [and that is saying a lot](http://brooksreview.net/2011/06/comcast/).