An article in today’s New York Times ends by saying that 85% of California adults think sites should not track around-the-web behavior for the purpose of ad targeting. The rest of the article describes how many of the major commercial web companies do just that.

There’s a comScore graphic that shows how many times a month companies collect user data: Yahoo collects twice as often as Fox, which collects twice as often as AOL. Google (not including DoubleClick) comes up 4th.

This data, however, doesn’t include information entered on MySpace’s social network pages, and the article doesn’t cover Facebook. Even if web companies aren’t putting two and two together yet, they will be soon.

If we’re not already, we’ll be seeing ads that come to us thanks to a delectable combination of which causes we join on Facebook, which people we befriend on MySpace, which keywords we use on search sites, and what products we buy online… combined of course with our offline data: which magazines we subscribe to, what we buy at the grocery store, and what we put on our credit cards. Is this OK?

Many a social network user’s holy grail is to see social networks aggregated - to quote Jeremiah Owyang,

A movement has been started to allow these relationships to be transplanted from one social network to another. The goal? reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data.

I spent some time several years ago working at Sxip pursuing one aspect of this dream. Kaliya Hamlin of Open ID, the folks who started FOAF, and many others (feel free to help me out by listing in comments) have continued the crusade.

Here’s my question: Is the fight to look at this problem from the user’s perspective a losing battle? When it happens, perhaps it will be the provider’s profit motive that drives it, and the advertisers that benefit. Jeremiah suggests that the benefit to the social network is “increase their number of users”. But isn’t the real benefit “finally make real money by selling user data to the highest bidder to make more targeted ads”?

Can users really retain control of their data, or has the horse already left the barn? Maybe we want to keep our social networks separate after all.

Interested to hear your thoughts.