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The Death of Privacy
Debra D'Agostino writes, "Why don't companies care about privacy? Because there's not enough money to be made from securing sensitive customer information, says Jeff Rothfeder in an article posted recently at CIO Insight. Furthermore, there's not enough money to be lost in privacy breaches for companies to care. 'Most companies claim that privacy is a priority — chiefly because they believe consumers are more willing to do repeat business with them if personal information is carefully handled,' he writes. 'But in reality, many companies are woefully inept at protecting privacy.'"
If a company screws up with your data, you should be able to sue them. Period. Once you do that, companies will start being more careful.
Why do I envision a future society in which any kind of concern for privacy will be treated as a signal you have something to hide?
Oh, of course... that's because I'm paranoid.
My bad.
Supply-and-demand principle is ok in most respects, but if sheeple get used to their privacy being... well, public - it might become too late.
But I'm just paranoid. Don't mind me.
Ignore this signature. By order.
In deffense of RS (god I hate having to do this), SSN is only asked for times when a credit check is required (opening a store credit card or starting a cellphone contract).
:P).
At a standard sale the most you will be asked for is zip (and only if the associate is a good one and doesn't just clear the screen like most do).
Returns/service plans(yes, I know, garbage)/instalations/etc do require name/addy, and the only one where there is a question about giving it out is for returns, and for that? you will find more and more stores getting tired of return fraud and requiring it (that and directed marketting
There are countless reasons to hate RS, don't get hung up on one that doesnot exist.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
In the UK no one really uses the word crappy.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That's why we have laws and penalties. What we need is stiffer penalties for privacy violations by companies.
Unfortunately, because of corporate charters, most companies can do things that would land an individual person in jail for a very long time.
If an individual did the same thing as the Sony Rootkit, he would be faced with hard jail time.
Where as Sony just got a slap on the wrist and no one... Not a single developer, intern, manager, or CEO went to jail or even were placed in court.
We need a better system of punishing people who do illegal things via their corporate proxy.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I don't mean to offend anyone with blasphemous statements against your religion (Government Worship)... But laws don't solve problems.
To give an example everyone has heard of, take prohibition in the 1920s. The U.S. government banned alcoholic beverages... but since there still existed a huge demand for alcoholic beverages, and since there was an huge financial incentive to provide those beverages, it created an entire underground economy. Not only did alcohol consumption grow, but the ill effects were a lot worse (alchohol actually became cheaper because it was unregulated and untaxed, and a lot of alchohol was contaminated and caused really bad health effects). The result of banning alcohol was the creation of modern organized criminal gangs, an increase in alchohol consumption, and lots of dangerous poison being sold as booze.
Another example of government policies that do exactly the opposite of what they intend, rent control. The idea of rent control is that by limiting the amount of money that property owners can charge, it will help reduce the cost of housing in a city. However, often the cost of taxes, maintanence, etc., is greater than the maximum rent an owner is allowed to charge under the rend controls. This means that the owner can either not pay some expenses and since they have to pay their taxes or debt or go to jail or lose the property, they usually save money by cutting down on maintainence - rental properties begin falling apart as owners save costs they aren't making on rent by not maintaining buildings. Also, because there is no real profit in running rental buildings, no-one invests in new rental properties, people who already own rental property convert them to condos (which they can sell at a fair price), or just refuse to maintain the building and when it is no longer fit for use just shut it down. Rent control programs are usually followed by long term increases in rent, and often devistate huge portions of poor neighborhoods.
Also, you are forgetting that government is part of the problem of managing privacy. Governments issue indentification information (such as social insurance numbers, or whatever it is called in your country), that must be protected, yet don't have any protection in them. They created this government sanctioned IDs and numbers, without creating the proper infrastructure to protect those numbers. Not only that, but government catalogs the most amount of information on you! Now, I know that government worhsipers don't think it is bad that the government catalogs all your education, health, financial information and such... but government security of those things cannot be that strict. Which means that even if your own government did not share the information, it is easy enough for foreign governments and their spy and security services to get that information (if you think that the NSA, the CIA, or other spy agencies in the world, don't secretly aquire the information your government collects on you, you are a fool!)... And once foreign governments get that data they share it with friendly corporations. Right now, every scrap of data that your government collects on you (which is a lot of data) is shared with politically connected corporations, all around the world!
So, anyway, expecting the governments in the UK and the EU to protect your privacy, is pure fantasy. Not only is it very questionable that the laws would work as intended (doubtful, considering the huge economic incentive that companies have to compromise your privacy... where ever there is huge money to be made on something, people will do it)... but the governments of the UK and EU actually built the infrastructure (government issued ID numbers, centralized collection of your financial, health, education, etc., data) for large corporations to collect all your data.
At best, the Data Protection Act is theater designed for Euro politicians to say "look, we are doing something to protect your privacy".