Bill Gates Knows What You Did Last Summer

theodp writes "Give Bill Gates your 'pictures, videos, documents, e-mail, instant messages, addresses, calendar dates/scheduling information (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, appointments), voice mail, phone logs, RSS feeds, subscriptions, bookmarks, mail lists, project management features, computing device data, tasks and location data,' and he'll improve your 'quality of life.' That's the promise behind a patent issued Thursday to Bill Gates and his 20 co-inventors for 'Personal Data Mining', which Microsoft notes 'can include a monetization component' that 'could initiate an auction to sell information to the highest bidder.'"

Comments

Privacy

[Hatta]

Is not privacy essential to a high quality of life?

Re:Privacy

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

Okay, I'm confused. Whenever privacy is discussed around here, we say "wouldn't it be great if we could retain personal control over our data, and could willingly decide whom to sell our data to?"

So know someone with a great deal of economic leverage is trying to push exactly such a system, and all of slashdot goes "Oh my god, how evil! Quick, everyone give your data away for free, so nobody can monetize them any more, not even yourself!"

Guys, Bill Gates stopped being the most evil man about five years ago. I care much less about the shortcomings of Windows than I care about Google and Facebook knowing more about me than I do myself. At this point, I'd be willing to pay Bill Gates if he offers to secure all my personal data.

Re:Privacy

[Lumpy]

You CAN do that by limiting the amount of data created.

#1 - Store loyalty cards? GET RID OF THEM.
#2 - Use ONLY CASH for every transaction. Some really big ones you cant, but you can limit the data creation.
#3 - DONT register warranty cards, or registration of anything.
#4 - Xbox live user? Use a not connected to you information base and ONLY use scratch and sniff cards. make a random person that cant be connected to you, this is not hard.
#5 - Prepaid cellphone with only cash bought minutes from cards linked to fake information.

There are a lot more, but it can be done. The problem started with YOU not getting verbally upset with banks selling your information to everyone. Along with stores, etc... The time to have stopped this was 20 years ago before an entire industry was created around collecting data on everyone.

Some places now have cameras at the card swipe machine pointing at your face from the keypad. I guarentee these are taking a snapshot of you and can be used to attach your cash purchase to you. Simply covering the camera before you enter view will solve that.

If you want to protect your information and privacy you have to work hard at it because your government does not care one tiny bit about it.

Re:Privacy

[Hatta]

What sort of privacy did you have in a hovel with -3-4 generations of family all sleeping on the same dirt floor?

What sort of quality of life did you have then? You had piss poor privacy, and piss poor quality of life. As people's fortunes improved, they chose to improve their quality of life by increasing their privacy.

Isn't that called Google?

[nweaver]

Isn't that already called Google, where you give them your email, your pictures, your videos, your calendar, all your documents, all your web searches, and about half of your total web surfing (*cough* analytics *cough* doubleclick *cough)?

Re:Isn't that called Google?

[amicusNYCL]

What exactly did Google do to earn your trust that Microsoft never could?

Re:Isn't that called Google?

[nschubach]

especially not a publicly traded, for-profit corporation.

You say that like the "not-for-profit" companies are any better. Most of them are pushing agendas of their own. Just because they don't profit share with stockholders doesn't make them any more trustworthy.