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QANTAS Wants To Monitor Frequent Flyers' Home Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Australian Airline QANTAS wants to monitor recording frequent flyers' home internet searching and surfing. QANTAS will pass the data to US marketing partner FreeCause who are not subject to Australian privacy laws. Meanwhile the Australian Attorney-General's Department has been secretly drafting new data retention laws to log Australians' web surfing. The government claims it needs these to fight crime, yet is ignoring corruption by its own public service."
The madness must stop.
Thanks Timothy for posting the most horribly written, inaccurate and misleading summary ever. You should be ashamed for this clickbait trolling. Anybody who reads the fucking article will see your summary has little connection to the truth.
No wonder slashdot is such a toilet bowl now.
Just another way the West has fallen into tyranny. But yet, there is comparatively little outrage. The violations of liberty that King George III imposed on the American colonists were minor compared to the crimes that modern presidents have committed. But yet although there will be a posting on websites like /. and will be discussed by liberty-minded bloggers there will be no revolution, there will be no outrage. Isn't it odd how times have changed, when a minor (by today's standard) tax increase sparked a revolution but today's routine violation of individual sovereignty, violation of basic civil liberties and violation of basic economic liberties have created.... a couple of blog posts.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
1) I'm normally pretty shy, but, umm, if I had a VM, it would be okay with me to install the Airline Privacy-Invading Spyware Toolbar in a VM
2) I would then do nothing on the VM other than search for My Little Pony two or three times a day, probably in the early evening hours.
3) So that it looks like a trend and not just a rarity in the long tail, encourage other members of the Herd to do likewise
4) Smile, smile, smile when some overworked jackapple in the airline's marketing department, confused by this spike in the data, paints a rainbow on a Dash-8 because the data mining algorithm says that'll make it 20% cooler.
The madness must stop.
Over the next several decades - or maybe as soon as a several years, supposed "free" countries will chip away at their citizen's rights little by little always using "safety" and "security" as the excuse. And there will be plenty of dipshits who buy into it and will keep voting those politicians into office. Until one day, we will all be governed by a pseudo representative government.
Armed revolt? Ahahahahahaha! See, this time, that has been dealt with. While all the NRA members and others go and quit their jobs to fight the government with their AR-15s with the M4 conversion kits that they paid through the noses for, the banks will foreclose on their homes, their cash will be gone, and what do you think they are going to do for supplies - like ammo?
Reload? And where the fuck are they going to get the lead? Or the kits to clean their guns? Or the powder?
And, and bunch of yahoos who spend a day or so at the shooting range pinking away at targets will be no match for a trained army - or ATF agents who are putting down a home grown terrorist cell (That's what they'll be called in the news and you bet your asses that the NSA has got the NRAs member list!)
What the current President of the NRA doesn't realize is that in the beginning of the US' Revolutionary War, the English were mopping up the colonists because they were a trained army. If it weren't for the French, we'd be like Canada or Australia.
I like the "sign up, use it once, than uninstall" to get your "free" 200 points option. That is, if you're already on their bonus point system. :-)
When tyranny comes to America, the NRA members will not be fighting the government. They will be at the rallies, waving flags and chanting slogans between the Sousa marches.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Aussies do not have free speech ""Some of us may presume that because we live in a liberal democracy like Australia, certain personal freedoms are a given "like free speech" Additionally, we presume that many Australians would be familiar with the US Constitution and specifically the First Amendment which states; "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", and we’re going to also guess (again for efficacy) that some people may believe that we here in Australia also enjoy a similar type of Constitutional protection: But do we? Well it must be said that Australia’s free speech laws are interesting to say the least...""
""First, let's get the easy part out of the way: Australia does not have an explicit First Amendment equivalent enshrining the protection of freedom of speech in our Constitution." http://www.findlaw.com.au/articles/4529/do-we-have-the-right-to-freedom-of-speech-in-austr.aspx
Talk to Aussies and you find they hate their government and think politicians are lying cheating scumbags with their snouts in the trough, but if you criticize them you can be charged by sedition laws by John Howard: "Sedition: An intention to effect any of the following purposes: (a) to bring the Sovereign into hatred or contempt; (b) to urge disaffection against the following: (i) the Constitution; (ii) the Government of the Commonwealth; (iii) either House of the Parliament;" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_sedition_law
Not like these kind of laws are passed but not used. Albert Langer told the public how to vote on election day for a local candidate without having to give their vote to Labour or Liberal candidate in the end. The government jailed him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#Australia
Qantas has had a form of spyware for years. Over 7 years ago I saw it's first version. It was a horrible crash prone mess. It was a flight search bar with other value add addons. And yes it reported to the mother ship.
A lot of airlines did the same. So did package delivery companies.
I work rather closely with large companies that are deploying or have deployed improved analytics tools to track your every click. Big brother exists. An issue is it's not just one big brother.
Face book for example. Almost every single app is mining your account for information. Very use any of the facebook apps if you must use facebook. Only ever give the minimal amount of information. Remember you are the product.
If you are dumb enough to ever install a "toolbar" then you get what you asked for. There is no such thing as a free value addon. They will all cost you dearly.
Browsers need to remove support for toolbars and other features that cater to malware extensions, like they should have done 10 years ago.