Pudding Media wants to monitor what you talk about and serve relevant ads in exchange for free phone calls

Pudding Media is a San Jose-based start-up that aims to intrude our privacy more than any other company. Their idea is to provide users with free, advertising supported phone service via Internet. When you’re using their service, voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the computer screen while you’re still talking.

While this may sound scary to some people I find it quite useful especially for long distance calls to some countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe where calling rates are usually higher. In addition, if you think about it, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) monitors your email and chat sessions to serve relevant ads to GMail, so it’s actually not the first time this happens…

[Via: textually.org]