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If You're Not Paranoid About Your Privacy, You're Crazy (theatlantic.com)

Muad'Dave writes: Here's an interesting article at The Atlantic about the prevalence of surveillance and the recent uptick in 'deja-vu' moments where devices seemingly hear your conversations and then attempt to market to you. From the article: "One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused my loved ones enough pain? Some of these disconcerting prompts were harder to explain. For example, the appearance on my Facebook page, under the heading “People You May Know,” of a California musician whom I’d bumped into six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA custom, he had never told me his last name nor inquired about mine. And as far as I knew, we had just one friend in common, a notably solitary older novelist who avoided computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned that by entering my number into his smartphone’s address book (compiling phone lists to use in times of trouble is an AA ritual), the musician had probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page."

3 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Some basic rules by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Funny

    It may have been given but it was not free. It had a cost albeit paid by the mother. Nothing in life is free and if you think it is then you are the one being foolish.

    Exactly, to stretch far enough to make the statement seem true, you have to undefine other words so that they never can be used. Once you've redefined "free" so that nothing can be called free, even the supposedly free stuff that triggers recital of the cliche, then you can pretend it is true.

    Except, it is a load of crap. Things can be free, that is why we have the word. The word describes real situations, it is not a word like "Utopia" that describes imaginary or "prefect" forms of things. Free stuff exists, just check popular writing to see that the word is used that way and therefore contains all those meanings.

    If you're politically opposed to all things free, just be that. You don't have to believe that people are incapable of giving just because you decided that giving is bad.

    Like it or not, you just got some free advice. Take it or leave it. But if you claim it cost something, I won't believe you.

  2. Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    You're a Dutch heterosexual?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Re:- JEW - weapons - by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Yes, and those pesky little joos also employ trickery by playing devil's advocate and post anti-semitic drivel on message boards anonymously in an attempt to bait non-joos so they can attack them and spew their hatred of the goyim.