TER General Board
Old school days are gone. The MAN has the technology and big business/corporation has a new tool. Wish they weren't this way, but then I'm a hobbyist!
Joey
Hee hee
My favorite trick, is to leave misrepresentative paper trails whenever I can. This new scheme, according to the newspaper article, is basically "intended" (word used advisedly) as a marketing tool. They'll figure out if you have a Visa, and then whether you prefer Shell or Mobil, and then whether you go to the Rockies or the seashore, and then start targeting ads when you hit appropriately programmed websites. Or, in the near future, TV and radio channels.
So, what I do, is get on the mailing lists of all the most inappropriate sorts of groups I can. I am a die-hard Libertarian who almost always votes Democrat (go figure) so, I've signed up for everything free that the Republican and Green parties can mail to me. I figure it's costing them postage, at least.
Also, I'm in my mid-thirties but have been solicited by the American Association of Retired Persons for almost two decades now. I get all the gardening and needlepoint catalogs designed for seniors. Heehee.
I don't own a home, but I've applied for home-equity loans (and, naturally, gotten rejected by the automated system when it read the total value of my house as "$0"). I hate American football, so the NFL sends me thirty or forty requests a year about joining my "local team" fan club. My "local team" changes about once a month. I tend to pick whoever happens to have been slaughtered last week. Heehee.
When I DO want a service or product, I use my real name, rather than the thinly veiled variation which I use for the stuff above. Basically, a simple switch from Johnnie Public to John Q. Public helps me keep in mind who is stealing my information for whom.
I don't have much problem with marketeers having access to my information. I would rather that targeted internet-based merchandise make its way closer to outlets near me, than that I continue to have to buy oversided Wal-mart-waddler based bluejeans and have them tailored down to my more svelte size, simply because someone in Brockton Connecticut figured out that statistically most Americans are obese. The marketing stuff doesn't bother me.
But the FBI stuff really really bothers me. And I am SURE that the former (business use) is the beginning of a slide down the slippery slope toward the latter (oppression), especially in a world where citizenship itself is coming more and more to be defined in terms of who can afford to buy certain rights. So I make sure nobody has anything accurate on me. It's not hard to do, really. And we also have Microsoft to thank for infiltrating all those information-gathering systems with computer geeks who don't have enough education to know how to think clearly, and its own software to inevitably crash.
Unfortunately, it's a "guilty until proven innocent" type of thing -- I have to go out of my way to force a situation which we would all prefer to be the default, rather than the authorities going out of THEIR way to make it possible for me to lead a free life. And that I dislike greatly -- but I'm not so much of a fool as to believe that any governmental system has ever operated differently.
Anyone seen "Bob Roberts"? The "committee" government is indeed growing -- Ashcroft and Rumsfeld are just figureheads of the NSC and so forth. Don't let 'em know what we know about 'em!