Slashdot Mirror
The Good and Bad of Data Collection
Nephilium writes "Reason magazine has dedicated their latest issue to a discussion of privacy and data collection. They sent subscribers a customized cover of the magazine [as previously covered on Slashdot]. Some good points as to the benefits and drawbacks of who is sharing your information." The sample targeted advertisements are for non-profit organizations, but it may not be long until someone figures out how much companies will pay to utilize this sort of targeting.
TerraServer!
Reason's cover didn't quite get ashcroft's house correctly. It should be this pic (or big 1800x1500 version). Not as scary when they know your work location and not your house.
(from this cryptome eyeball - it is a lot of data since it covers 4 places, please don't slashdot)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I haven't looked for a home address there in a few years though so I'm not sure how up-to-date they are with the photos on file.
There is such a system right now. They're called prepaid credit cards. They're marketed in several different ways. Some convenience stores sell them right next to the prepaid cell phone cards targetting them at the people who can't get real credit cards because they've ruined their own credit history already. They're also seen at Simon-owned malls around the nation as what they're selling instead of selling traditional mall gift certificates now. Parents are pitched such cards as a way to establish a hard-limit on their children's spending. The prepaid cards are backed by either the Visa or MasterCard networks to create near-universal acceptance by merchants who won't even care that they're not traditional credit cards.
The catch? The transaction fees on these things are horrendous. Anybody who has the credit history to qualify and the personal resolve to not charge things they can't pay off is better off getting a real credit card... those are free to have, free to use, and also contribute good notes to your credit history for your future credit requests.
If you want to avoid giving your name for tin foil hat purposes, at least you have the option to get a nameless credit card. However, you're going to pay extra for that privledge.
... your medical history, but the people who transcribe your doctor's dictation ... these people may be doing the transcription in countries where the U.S. privacy laws are unenforceable. Consider the following scenario as detailed by David Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 2004:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/04/02/MNGI75VIEB1.DTL
globexplorer.com seems to have better looking shots. Wow my roof needs work.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Lamer. Real geeks read Nuts & Volts. ;-)
I also must admit I've never once disliked the ads in those magazines, I could even truthfully say I buy them as much for the ads as anything else. But the truth is, no one gets rich in marketing letting people know about products they would already want. So this stuff about "if they only had more data, they'd target us" is bullshit. They'll still be trying to sell you a subscription to GQ, the latest fashion deoderant, and GM sports car.
Actually, we used the terraserver images originally, but in the course of pre-publicity AirPhoto USA contacted us and offered to let us use their aerial photos (where available) in conjunction with the public domain USGS files.
In terms of geocoding, we didn't try to go in and find a home address. That's why people with subscriptions pointing to PO boxes got a photo of the post office or city center. Even when there was an home address, sometimes the geocoding (pulling lat/long info based on street address) was a bit off due to variations in the way that addresses are determined/recorded.
In any case, if people have technical questions, feel free to post them and I'll do my best to answer (I led the implementation of this project).
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Gobs and gobs of satellite data are available here - i worked at a small company that made heavy use of this. Takes some effort to figure out all the gobbledygoop, but the effort is all it costs to get data.