Bear in mind that this is purely hypothetical, if opendns were ever to be bought by another company (something which happens rather a lot in the IT world)...
"What on Earth do you think they can do with your IP address?" Are you serious? They will have a record of every website you visit, and can use that data to select adverts that you are more likely to respond to everytime one of their ad-panels appears on any page that has been requested by your IP address (and with VM cable connections, you have to go out of your way to force a change to your IP - so to all intents and purposes, we have static IP addresses). If you sign up for the "free account with added benefits" (which most uninformed punters will - afterall, it's something for "free" isn't it?) then they'll also have your name, address, e-mail, etc. and things could start to get really creepy - personalized messages containing your private details appearing in ad-panes on websites you've never been to before, e-mails out-of-the-blue with friendly, over-familiar messages saying "since you were looking at such-and-such on the web yesterday at 2.15pm, we thought you'd like to hear about our new product...". And before you say "ah, but they're not allowed to do that" don't forget: they're not bound by UK data protection or privacy laws, and the US equivalents are so weak as to be a joke- were opendns to be bought by someone like doubleclick, it would be like Facebook Beacon applied to virtually every website you're likely to visit (except the BBC - God bless 'em for not carrying advertising!)
This isn't paranoia; it's the dream business model for all advertisers, and I'm not the only one who doesn't want to be tracked by people whose sole purpose in life is to part me from my hard-earned cash. At best, I find advertising to be a minor annoyance, at worst it's downright intrusive. I don't need to be told what I want to buy - I know what I want to buy, and I'm quite capable of finding it myself.
Glad I got that off my chest- I'm off to find my tin-foil hat now. It keeps me warm at night and stops the aliens reading my thoughts...
