Slashdot Mirror
Seems Nobody Gives A Damn About Privacy
sulli writes "Remember how everyone got all up in arms about Yahoo's plans to spam and coldcall all of its members? Well, even if slashdot readers were pissed and angrily deleted their accounts, the vast majority of users did nothing. (New York Times, blah blah) So much for the big popular revolt, I guess. Market away, Yahoo!" Sigh.
if you did what I did and fed them a bunch of bogus information about yourself. In fact, I think I listed my neighbors' phone number and adderss (with a different zip code).
Uh oh.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Rather hypocritical if you ask me.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Group 1 completely overwhelms group 2, but to further minimize any chance of making anything other than a moral difference, I'll bet group 3 overwhelms group 2 as well. The third group counts as votes in favour of, or at least ambivalent to the concerns of the second group since as far as yahoo concerns its a satisfied customer.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Any revolution is lead by a few who are willing to sacrifice anything for what is right. How many of the "privacy" advocates are willing to give up their job, risk harassment, and alienate friends in the quest to do what is "right?"
Of course I'm cynical -- I've studied history, and I've worked the frontlines of various causes. Complaining that other people won't "fight the good fight" is a waste of effort. If the fight is worth fighting, then you must be willing to take the responsibility on your back to "do the right thing."
All about me
Here's what's wrong with it: It turns out that Yahoo was able to discover both my work and home emails - without me ever knowingly signing up with yahoo. The first two spams I got: from Yahoo, "Hey we're gonna start spamming you! follow this link to unsubscribe!"
I follow the links. It insists I tell yahoo my birthday and my zip code to unsubscribe - BUT I NEVER GAVE THAT INFO TO YAHOO IN THE FIRST PLACE!
I had signed up with some list services ("ThisIsTrue" for one) that (unknown to me) were hosted by Yahoo groups, and that's how yahoo misappropriated my email. I had to send nasty grams to Yahoo to get them to unsubscribe me, cuz the online auto system won't tell me what it thinks my Bday and zip code are.
By the way, the writer/moderator of ThisIsTrue was equally pissed that Yahoo took HIS mailing list and made it THEIRs without his permission.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I started a thread on MacNN about the fact that any cocoa application can read a new Macintosh's unique serial number. I even wrote a sample program that accesses and displays it.
I thought that others might be as concerned as I was. Instead, someone confirmed that, yes-- the Mac's GUID is globally accessible, yes-- it's on the motherboard... but no need to worry because "As much as you feel that the serial number can be abused it won't. No vendor has shown any indication that they will use unique IDs in their programs and all we can do is hope that they won't."
Uh yeah right. Except for Windows 98, RealNetworks, Word for Mac, etc.
Why is that Intel's GUID problems were such a big deal and this barely gets a shrug?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And none of them read it, because it looked like every other piece of spam and crap they get from companies like Yahoo every day. I certainly don't remember getting a message from Yahoo, because it was lost in all the other crap i get in my mailbox.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
For what it's worth, I ended my relationship with Yahoo. I learnt ages ago that an email address with no POP3 access is of no use to me. Add to that the fact that I used to receive 30-odd peices of spam to my Yahoo account each day and there was no value left in the service. I now use sneakemail, spamcop and my private ISP account that never gets posted anywhere. I've had one spam come through on the alias I used for "GoogleGroups" since I posted something about 3 weeks ago. That alias is currently queuing messages at the sneakemail server...
It's the best mail account that I have ever had for not getting spam. If you sign up for a hotmail account, you will have spam within a half hour. I've used yahoo mail for about 6 months WITHOUT ANY SPAM WHATSOEVER. and if you do get spam, they have spam filters (which haven't caught anything, as it tells you) My secret: DON'T GIVE OUT YOUR MAIN EMAIL ADDRESS ONLINE. keep a spam account for site registration purposes. No online service has my home phone and/or home address either.
As I recall, all it took was one visit to http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount to remove myself from their marketing schemes. they sent me an email advising me to go there if i cared.
I'm not sure why slashdot keeps making such a big deal out of it. I haven't been forced into anything. I'm happy with the service. I'd actually recomend it as the best free email service I've ever had.
Thought police don't need to resort to such primitive tactics. The reason that police states have always broken down is because there are too many cracks. There are too many places to hide, to slowly spred sedition, to slowly build a resistance to the oppressors. It's a simple matter of resources; you cannot track all the people all the time. Or can you?
With the vast increases in computing power, suddenly the ability to manage the raw data created by people on a daily basis is within reach. Suddenly using all of the cameras spread through the cities to track people's movements is completey possible. Suddenly an agent can go through credit receipts of millions of people and use a profiling system to weed out the people that are potentially unsavory for the government.
No need to take them out in the night and torture them. That's clumsy and builds hatred by the masses. Label the person an extremist, a terrorist, a pedophile. Talk abut all the terrible things the person's done. Some of it may be true, some not, but with all that data floating around out there, you can probably find a few juicy tidbits to destroy political opponents.
A police state is now, more than ever, a viable possibility. With all of this information out there and, more importantly, the increasing ability to do something useful with that data, it becomes very easy to track the unsavories. It may even be made easier because the unsavories cover their tracks leaving obvious information voids in their wake.
Maybe this is a tad paranoid, but tell me that this isn't technically possible...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I can't be with you. The previous poster hitted the point, you didn't.
"Sure, a lot of things might happen as a result of Yahoo collecting and sharing some personal information, but the images of Orwell's 1984 just aren't among the set of might happen scenarios."
The thing is that yes, *they are*.
As an example, I can mention what happened in Germany by the WWII days, but I'll tell what happened on Spanish Civil War (1936-39) since I know about that first hand:
An uncle-grandfather of mine (I don't know if it's the name, anyway, a brother of my grandfather) was summarily executed during the first days of the civil war. He was so because he was teacher, member of the local esperant society, "obviously" known to be anarchists, criminals and even women rapist (the true is he was more of an idealist than an activist as my grandparent told me). The question is he was executed *because* someone had the information a *abused* it!!!
You can think this is something that *won't happen to you*, but once you're in the path, you eventually will reach the goal. And clearly the USA is in the path... and many other countries (notably Europe) are gladly following it.