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Such a Thing as too Paranoid About Privacy?
jackoahoy! writes "As we become more connected, we have the right to be paranoid. But the question is: where do we draw the line between sane and insane privacy? CoolTechZone's Gundeep Hora tackles this issue and uses a recent blog entry on Infoworld to illustrate his point. From the article: 'Whether it's OnRebate.com or any other rebate managing company, asking for the industry you work in and your job function aren't the most personal questions they could possibly ask. However, they must carefully define the conditions for collecting such information. Targeted advertising by user opt-in newsletters and e-mail campaigns (unlike spamming) or internal market research to get a grasp on its customer base isn't unethical, in my opinion. And people making a big deal out of two vaguely placed questions is insensible and out of proportion. If you really are that paranoid about privacy, then do what this reader did and put in wrong information under those questions.'"
...to do the right thing.
If that's their reasoning, then let them ask for the demographic info WHEN the user opts in.
Otherwise they have it sitting there, calling thier name like a chocolate cake in the fridge at 3am. Yeah, they'll never give in to the temptation... and that cake is still sitting there, too.
Quite. If they want to know this stuff so badly, they can compensate me with the only thing that will work: money.
No money, no info. It's that simple.
I wouldn't mind all the spam I get if I got paid to receive it, ya know?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Why does everyone get up in arms about these companies who have absolutely no verification of your identity? I usually just fill out something like "Penguin P. Finsbury" and a ZIP code of 90210, and put equally garbage data in the rest of the fields. Save your energies for the real scary privacy stuff, like the credit card companies who actually know who you are. Just give garbage data to the cheesy websites; their market research will be crap as a result and no one will buy it.
I got an iPod for christmas. I installed the software, which required my name and email address, and was forced to opt out for spam. Then I had to update the iPod software. I was forced to enter my name and email address and opt-out for spam. Then I had to update the iTunes software, where I was yet again forced to enter my email address and opt-out for spam. Thats 3 times in 15 minutes that a single company attempted to get my information and permission for spam. At this point, I was so pissed off that I entered a really long, expletive-laced fake email address to download iTunes.
It doesn't matter to me if a company has a reasonable privacy policy when they do everything in their power to get your permission for spam anyway. Like all advertising, it is invasive, persistent, underhanded, and extremely annoying. As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with privacy. It is unreasonable marketing practices that piss me off. I think it pisses a lot of people off, and the backlash from that is a demand for more privacy.
No sig now
But you are compensated. You get better deals on v1agr4 and loads of other products.
On a serious note, isn't this what reward cards are for from stores? give them your details in exchange for better deals & money off.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
As I own my own domain, I give a new email alias (e.g. stuff_amazon@happystuffplace.com for an Amazon account) to each entity that asks me for one. Of course, none of these is the one I use for correspondence with people I know. This way, I know exactly who it was that sold my address to a spam list, and can block it with no detriment to my "real" addresses.
I find this as a compromise between real address and dead-end junk, because, for a good deal of sites, I do want them to send me the email... I just want the option to ignore all their email later, should conditions change.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I think we're finding out who among are true conservative and who are Party Religionists. The GOP is no longer conservative (unless you consider a Theocracy conservative rather than reactionary). No, the GOP has become Socialist, as in National Socialist.
Oh, shit! Run! Here comes Steve Godwin!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
You draw the line when whoever your giving data to, doesn't need to know. For instance, if I buy something in a hardware store, and the clerk asks for my name and address for the recipt, I'll be annoyed, but given that the expensive hardware may break, I'll go along generally.
However, if the company starts asking my age, education level, bank account number, purchase history etc, I'm going to be seriously offended. If they do, I just lie outright. Give the dirty data fiends some serious false positives. Why I'm a 36 year old primary school dropout who will be buying at least $20,000 worth of home applicances this year.
May the Maths Be with you!
I think the important question that would solve all this is "What is the chocolate cake?" What exactly can they do with this information? Granted I don't want them to have it, but what can they do with it that really would hurt me? Our country is pretty far away from Hong Kong (on the Orwellian map), where you get 10 years prison for spitting gum out on the sidewalk. I don't see collecting information to be a chocolate cake. Maybe one my mom baked, but certainly nothing appetizing at all. It might look nice on the outside, having all those names and numbers and addresses, but it would take a lot of digestion energy to do something useful with it.
Too bad for you, you could save some money and help your grocer better serve you while giving up no personal data at all. I use several of those cards, and "save" quite a bit over what you are likely paying, and not a single one has any real information about me in the profile connected to them. All they know is somebody in my area purchases certain products. This type of information is of value to whatever store I shop at, and they do in fact compensate me with lower prices for using their card. I give up no personal data at all, and they get to learn what kinds of things their customers buy. It's a win-win situation.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
provide false and misleading information.
NEVER give anyone anything, ever.
The *ONLY* exceptions are banking and police/gubmint.
Everyone else gets a flaming chainsaw up the ass sideways..
The inverse is true. The advertisers/marketers don't care about you they care about your kind. If they were that interested in you, they would just target you and steal from you, they want X number of people similar to you. There are things like "target demographics", "males between 25 and 35", "housewives" or "stay at home moms" if they have kids, etc.
Certain products, goods, or services may appeal to statistical outliers, but any marketer or advertiser never appeals to them, they appeal to the middle 2 standard deviations. Niche products even do this thing. About 1 in 5 women are into anal sex, butt 4 out of 5 are not into it and would not be into seeing advertisements for a better anal lube on TV even though it might even change their opinion of that kind of sex. Herpes medication is accepted though, because everybody knows somebody that has it.
I'm not paranoid about privacy in marketing. Nothing I buy that is legal to buy is that interesting. The good stuff is not advertised, nor needs to be. I've heard that Nukes go for something like $10 mil. Buying those might be of interest to some people, but being that the US government is too stupid to figure out which 3rd world country's government owns them or not, I can buy them in relative comfort.
By definition, paranoia is a mental delusion. If you are paranoid about your security, you've already gone too far. Maybe "cautious" is the word you're looking for (and no, I don't think you can be too cautious).
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
The issue isn't whether you're (too) paranoid, but whether you're paranoid enough.
Let me throw a different perspective in here...
As we are social animals, we are bound to want to share something of ourselves with others. We need to believe that we have something of value to share with friends as well as strangers. Exactly what information we choose to share is determined by how much trust we believe we can place in the other person. ("Person" including groups and organisations as well as individuals).
That's what the real problem comes down to - we are being given no choice. We are made to believe that our information is of no value, and so we should willingly give it up to some person whom we increasingly find ourselves unable to trust. It is not that we don't want to trust them, so much as the behaviour of those people reinforces to us that we cannot trust them.
When asked to provide private information as partial payment for goods or services (or to receive discounts or rebates on same), we instinctively feel cheated because we are trading our humanity for cash. We fight down that instinct at every turn, as we manage to convince ourselves that it is only a small loss for such great gain.
As other posters have pointed out before, if it's really of so little value, why are we repeatedly given such incentives to give out such information? Especially when the information we provide is so irrelevant for the goods or services provided?
A credit card company needs to know that you are 18 years of age, and have some way of uniquely identifying you - but date of birth is too much information for the former, and too little for the latter. Is the email address I provide when I enrol going to be used to save trees, or is it really just cheaper marketing? We're lapping up the convenience on offer, enjoying the opportunity to get something for almost nothing, and feeling trapped by something we just can't put our fingers on. And now, as individuals faced with increasingly long and complex forms (and an out-of-control legal system), none of us really knows how much information is required by law, and how much is just an opportunistic marketing grab.
In the end, I don't believe the problem is that we lack privacy. Most forms carry no penalty for lying. No, the problem is that we neither know nor trust the people we're giving our details to. And that's a situation that won't change while most of us chase after our personal privacy.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
Let me see, less information means poorly targeted advertising. Which means (a) you see even more adverts than otherwise (b) the company spends more on advertising for the same amount of sales. Which means that in order to make the same profit margin, the price has to go up.
Still think you don't get any value from your precious information, sport?
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Fuck them...I am not getting anything for free, so neither will they...
Incorrect, In fact California is the state which originated the case that went to the supreme court who decided that Americans never have to show ID to just walk doen the street. This is a seperate set of circumstances from any situations where a person has been stopped for commiting a crime or upon citation for any civil infraction, (such as riding a bicycle on the wrong side of a street) which in Californaia is sufficient justification for custodial arrest.