Google is flirting with what company chairman Eric Schmidt once called 'the creepy line.'

[Commentary] Google is flirting with what company chairman Eric Schmidt once called "the creepy line." At its recent developer conference, the Mountain View search giant showcased a number of new personalized technologies that many consumers will find useful, such as alerts of upcoming flights and restaurant recommendations. But the new services underscore the vast amounts of ever more personal data Google has collected on its users.

And given its history and the apparent attitudes of its leadership toward consumer privacy, the new services raise concerns about how Google collected that data and what else it's doing with it. That's because, while the company typically offers such services nominally for free, it's not being simply altruistic. We pay with our data for the services Google offers, and it's not always clear how the company uses that currency. The data that Google has collected could be used to discriminate against individuals in terms of what credit card offers they receive, what mortgage rates they are offered, even what medical treatments they might be offered, warned Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy rights group. And it could be used by law enforcement agencies who would never have been able to assemble such detailed dossiers on individual citizens. "The danger is that the data is being used to target them to make decisions about their personal lives in ways that can be harmful to them, that's not transparent to them and about which they can't have a say," said Chester. And that's just not cool.