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Profiling A Nation
Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd, Australia's biggest media company and allied to Microsoft, has teamed with IT services company, Acxiom, to create that country's biggest private data repository, according to this story. It will hold the cross-matched details of Australia's 20 million people culled from government electoral rolls, Microsoft-related Web sites including Hotmail and Passport, credit card reports, casino records, bank statements and a variety of undisclosed other sources to provide marketing profiles of the country's entire population. The plan is then to sell these to marketers, insurers, banks and others. Naturally, consumer advocates and privacy groups are wary. A similar Government-sponsored scheme, the Australia Card, was universally rejected by citizens more than ten years ago. Australians are generally not protected by any privacy laws.
What do you think: is it ok for private enterprise to hold such detailed information on our private lives, offering these to the highest bidder? Is privacy dead?
Sorry about the excessive bold text, I tried to turn it off but obviously typoed it. Lesson: NEVER submit without a preview :o(
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
There was a great three-part article in the Post last year about privacy in the digital age (really the lack thereof). Acxiom figured prominently into the story.
Most notably, the article said that Acxiom, in a nod to self regulation, allows consumers to opt out of the database. While I agree that opting-in is far preferrable for consumer rights, at least make the most of the current system (assuming you give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll do what they say). The company said that only 300 people had opted out prior pre-1998(!)
I actually went through the trouble to follow up on this after reading the article, and found out how to do it. Send them an email with your name and snail mail address and they send you a pretty package with a form to fill out and send back to them. Costs a stamp, but I'm of the opinion that these mega-snoops have too much to loose by getting busted directly violating what they say they'll do - so I had them take me out.
How about a ./ effect that spills over to snail mail?
optout@axicom.com gets you off of their marketing lists. They still have you on their other lists, which include credit info, etc, but are much more restricted. Still looking into getting off of those lists... /.ers, you can also opt out of direct marketing, tho I don't know the contact info for that. The national opt-out list in the US is run by the Direct Marketers Assoc. or somesuch.
Also, for US based
For the truly private, a few thoughts:
-pay cash or check, only
-don't ever fill out any sort of survey.
-when registering with utility co., insurance,etc where you have to provide some degree of info, specify that you want your info to remain private
-write your govt. reps, let them know how you feel
itachi
I agree, we need a Constitutional Amendment and I think you have the wording right or close to it.
Now where's my quill?
I think "personal knowledge" is a perfect term, one who's definition could take 200 years to fathom.
because the Chinese government figured out how to numb their population: they're getting them hooked on the same drug as Americans, materialism.
An interesting way to put it. And accurate, something that you work hard far, spend money on, and provides intense yet fleeting feelings of pleasure, quickly replaced by a longing for more. Yup that's cra^H^H^Hmaterialism. I still wanna new PC though, maybe I should see somebody..:)
+&x
I think it's outrageous that large companies would even think to do this. I don't want to sound innocent, they're obviously doing this for profit, but they must realize that it will backfire when everyone gets disgusted by their tactics. Oh, well, just my two cents. We are not numbers! Fred
How can Australia blow the whistle on Echelon, and then turn around and pull a stunt like this?
they're not a "supercompany" out to sell your info to the highest bidder.
- ----------
at least as far as I know...I'm just a lowly IT intern...but they're so hyped about security it's not even funny (the door to the snack room has a card reader)
I don't think this is the end of privacy.
dunkman
----------------------------------------
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Time Flies Like the Wind, Fruit Flies Like B
Instead of messing directly with the cookies file, why not run a filtering proxy, like Muffin, or JunkBuster, or AdBlocker, or pick up IBM's WBI and write your own filter to discard cookies or something.
Or, heck, just turn cookies off.
I, personally, need to have several cookies, one for Slashdot, one for Yahoo, and some others. These I wouldn't like to be mangled but all others can. I tried making cookies read only, but that didn't work. Would changing the owner of the cookies file do this?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
According to the ABC (the .AU one, not the American one), this will be covered by new privacy legislation. Whether this is effective is a different matter.
/.ers who were saying that the Australian media doesn't care (mainly in yesterday's article), this led the 6pm news on ABC today. Maybe the ABC reads slashdot...
For all the
Which brings me the problem of having my private information online, or in a database sold by the Australian government to Macy's. Sure, I hate getting mailers and catalogs. They drive me nuts, and since we have a trash can by our mail kiosk, they go straight from the mailbox into the garbage 99% of the time. This isn't an invasion of my privacy, but of my time. (There are ways you can legally force egregious catalog-senders to stop sending, btw, but that's another topic altogether.)
So what about this database? Has any human being ever read my personal information? Well, except for phone solicitors, no. (There are techno-fixes for that particular problem though; for example, you can put blocks on all numbers or specific types of callers.) Will anyone see it after it gets sold by the Australian Gov't? (I'm not an Aussie, but if I were...) No. Does anyone have access to it that might peep in my bedroom window to get his jollies or attack my wife and I at our door? No - no-one who wouldn't already know where I live. It's computers talking to computers, folks.
The computer you're staring at right now has tons of personal information stored on you. For most of us, our computers contain information that could get us fired or divorced or publicly embarrassed, if taken in the wrong context. These databases don't. Unless you went to prison (in which case it's public record anyway, and you're already required to divulge it to most of the people who would care), no corporate database is going to contain embarrassing or incriminating information about you. No human will ever see it, just another computer, printing another automatic mailer, writing your address on it and sending it in the mail, to be deposited straight into the trash.
I feel sorry for the pulp trees, but I have a hard time mustering any rage against the machine for these corporate databases.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
As an Australian, I think I have some right to request this.
Please, please, please write articles that portray us as idiots, not only on this issue, but especially on the who internet censorship thing.
Usually, Austrlians like to think of ourselves as pretty practical people, who don't put up with bullshit, and are honest enough with ourselves to admit we listen to what others have to say.
If people start writing stories saying how dumb some of our recent technical decisions have been, the media here will pick up on it.
Please help.. if you need ideas, email me.
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
I've always supported the Labor part becuase I've never thought the Librals had what it takes to govern in the second half of the 20th century, let alone the next. As for the Nationals!! Wow!! Lets ride our way out of this on the sheep's back again.
ANYWAY....
Having said that, apparently the government is putting a bill foward that will give us opt out rights for databases like this.
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes
Two problems with this:
If you're lucky.
Naturally you won't be able to remove that little incident with the dope at college (where you didn't inhale), or your heroic stint in the school crossing patrol during Vietnam (or whatever else your presidentials have been up to lately).
Last year I bought a house; a mortgage debt repossession. I still receive interesting mail related to the previous owner, I still have an amusing time with my business bankers (I also work from home) and I (rarely) get big guys in long coats turn up on the doorstep. Fortunately I have a lot of sympathy for the previous owner and the sense of humour that finds debt collectors on the doorstep funny (so long as they're not really after me). Yes, I have taken the appropriate measures to correct the UK's centralised databases on all this, yes, I still get the fallout.
The poor will have none of this. They'll collect whatever petty judgements against them (maybe a trivial fine, maybe missed payments on over-priced credit), and they'll be blacklisted from future credit or employment as a consequence. This is a fundamentally divisive measure for society as a whole. We already have a big problem in Western society where kids from large "sink" estates are blacklisted as proto-criminals before they've even left school. This measure will extend such lifelong marks of Cain from the housing ghetto to the information ghetto.
I do use junkbuster on a few of my browsing accounts. It is awesome, a very good thing.
But some places over-use cookies, forcing you to turn them on for that site. Not just slashdot and the New York Times -- I am not sure how they could avoid using them. But try to go to mapquest or cars.com and refine a search several times with cookies turned off. cars.com doesn't work at all; it keeps the zip code in a cookie (and also uses java, unfortunately).
Right now I turned off junkbuster filtering for slashdot and nytimes.com. It works ok -- I remove the junkbuster proxie when I have to use mapquest or cars.com. But a more general solution might drive a more societal change, and stop these people from feeling so free about tracking you in the first place.
Well, no. At least, not based on the current evidence.
The dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans is more complex (and less extreme) than this snippet implies
Al Gore is one of the chief backers of national ID cards. He's not a Republican! In fact, a Republican Congress would probably help retard moves in that direction should he become President; they've rejected already movies for centralized government repositories of medical information which were essentially the same thing. (In fact, the silly
There are both Democrats and Republicans on both sides of this issue, I'm sure, but often with different motivations. Both of the not-so-different mainstream political parties in the US claim to be for the American Way, the Constitution, blah blah blah, but they do not agree (evidently!) on what this means. Republicans tend more toward conservativism in their interpretation of laws, including the Constitution (hence their designation as conservatives, though they tend to be conservative in money matters as well for the same reasons); Democrats tend more toward liberal interpretation of the rightful powers of government, hence their designation as Liberals and their spending patterns.
In both of these, I say 'tend' because neither side has a good, prudent spending record, and William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, which publicize terrible spending projects, show that there are exceptions to both patterns.
I'm in neither one of those Parties, since (my opinion, natch) they're both basically composed of powerlusting estasblishmentarianists who spout off about trigger-issues fervently in public, but have in fact similar attitudes toward the public. There are smart people in or aligned with both of them, but that's no reason to join up as far as I can see.
Anyhow, my point is that I think if you are going to generalize one US political party as being in favor of national(ized) ID / information, it's *not* the Republicans, who tend to be more biased in the favor of individuals on issues like this. (Or at least no less biased -- there are data points all over the place and lots of interesting exceptions
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
In the US, Europe and Australia we are seeing the same kinds of stories over and over again. Governments are seeking to restrict our freedom and invade our privacy. Corporations are increasingly enabled by absence of legislation or the introduction of new legislation to do the same, through unauthorised collection of private information and through aggressive pursual of intellectual property rights.
As thongs stand, parliametary democracies as in the UK, US and Australia allow governments with a strong majority (achieved through electoral processes which favour the powerful) and individual lobby groups to ride roughshod over our rights and freedoms.
It's high time that we got ourselves some government that serves the interests of the people.
We need to establish a new kind of democracy that removes the ability of corporations to buy political favours, that forces governments to listen to their electorate and to act in the way we tell them to.
In my opinion we have in the internet a very useful tool via which to organise ourselves politically. But our governments want to control that too by censorship, by outlawing the private use of encryption, and by continually snooping on our conversations with the likes of Echelon and upcoming advances in AI-directed intelligent listening.
The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. If we don't get our act together soon, it will no longer be possible to change anything.
If you want your children to be free, then we must all campaign, demonstrate, orchestrate petitions, write to our MPs or Congressmen, boycott goods produced by corporations, make our voices heard.
Ranting about it on slashdot is just preaching to the converted.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree. Cookies are a sort of hack in the first place...what really needs to be done is some new way of supporting (preferably secure and private) sessioning over HTTP.
/everything/. If I'm going somewhere where I know they will try to shove cookies on me, I will usually temporarily turn off cookies.
Some proxies will let you define rules that can mask out or mask in certain addresses, so for instance, you could deny *.*.*.* but allow slashdot's IP and whatever other sites you visit.
Netscape has 3 cookie settings, but unfortunately they don't allow one to make deny/allow rules, so the settings effect
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Find out Where Acxiom gets its Data, and how to opt out (or try, anyway -- good luck):
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I am just trying to fathom what the tards who put this into action were thinking. Could they really be thinking that everybody would be better off if big corporations could by profiles on each person in a country to see what they like? Isn't this just an invitiation for spam anyways? I never read junk mail or spam... if I want something I go out and get it, I don't like being marketed.
In a sense, this says just as much about the vast abyss of unethical corporate behavior, as it does about how much we really care about it. We're so wrapped up in our immediate, consumeristic, material greed that we're literally selling our souls to the devil in order to get our fix.
It privacy really means anything, we *can* get it back - but it will take something that few people are willing to exercise these days: DISCIPLINE. Find out which companies are using the services of companies like Axciom - and DO NOT BUY FROM THEM. PERIOD. Will it mean inconvience? Probably. Will it mean foregoing some of life's immediate "pleasures"? Probably. The bottom line is this: what does ANY of this mean if you can't live with any sense of dignity, knowing that to someone on the other end of the phone, you're nothing but a summary, a profile, a collection of life-events that is really none of their damned business?
Being an australian, i think i know a bit about the australian psyche. Usually we are a pretty good bunch (not to be making a too sweeping generalisation), but compared to what we see of america i think we do ok. Our legal system is fair, and alot of the time i think our attitude comes down to 'she'll be right, mate'. /. for bringing to the attention of the world how behind we can be with some issues. But unfortunately, our easy attitude prevails with ppl never really getting off their ass to do something, unless they are threatened with a pay cut.
This makes day to day living kinda cool, but the flip side being that when something important comes along, we do little to stop it. Just a few weeks ago we had a national refferendum to see if we wanted to become a republic. The history of past refferenda guided the outcome of this one, a 'No' vote -- a sad day for me personally. What im trying to say is that there is a general apathy here which is amplified when it comes to 'technical' issues, look at the work of Richard Alston (a federal senator) who is passing all that crap trying to ban porn on the internet..
At this stage i would like to thank
Here i go, i make a call to ppl to do something. I dont know what, but do something. Help us.
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Is this as pure as evil gets?
/government/ in cohort with advertising agencies to reap data and profile its own population then sell it! Where is the democracy in /that/!
Egads a
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
But please think about user profiling for a bit: It isn't inherently evil. Most people don't want all their personal data floating from corporation to corporation. But unless this information is being used against you in some way, why do you care? In fact, it might be beneficial to you. How many times, guys, do you sit through some feminine hygeine commercial on TV, wishing they would realize they're missing their target? It is pretty much a fact of life, especially on this still-free network of ours, that advertising will be pretty much everywhere. If you're going to be subjected to all sorts of inane advertising, wouldn't you rather it be about something which you might be interested in? Just some thoughts to chew on.
I see that there is already a similar database for the US.
Coperations should be allowed to compile and use demographics. I am not a big fan of them as they tend to produce bland, for-almost-everyone, overmarketed products. But I don't really care. However when a company can access a database with lots of detailed information on a specific individuals or familys that is going too far. The company probably needs some information to conduct bussiness with me, but they don't need to know everything.
Stuff like this just pisses me off. I put some effort into trying to protect my privacy. I put effort into protecting my privacy and not doing something that could be seen as fraud and breaking the law. However, if companies no longer wish to honour my request for privacy, why should I honour their request for correct personal information?
Anyone know where I can get a good set of fake IDs?
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes.
Lord knows I would.
Imagine life in the future where there is a single huge repository of all marketing information on every single person in the entire world. Imagine what a different life experience people would have if they opted out of that particular database compared to those who choose to stay in? The person in the database would have every single piece of advertising directed specifically to him (remember this is the future) whereas the person who opted out would get the very basic stuff, maybe nothing if such a thing was a rarity (one can dream). Imagine the social implications! Would people in the "advertising club" look down apon those who are not because they are not part of "society"? Weird thoughts I just had.
I think the worse thing would be if people were not given the opportunity to opt-out of databases such as these. I don't like people being able to find out what type of ice cream I like or the last time I bought a newspaper. I have an inherent distrust of all marketing people and car salesmen.
I wear pants.
"In the US, Acxiom has established what it claims is the world's largest database, which holds personal details on 95 per cent of all US households, or some 330 million people."
How long do you think it will be before they decide to implement this here? (Not to mention, they'll probably patent this "great, new technology" =-P )
Now, when you receive spam from some fly-by-night company, they already have an order form enclosed with your home address, credit card number, and favorite color filled in for you. The question is, when do they start signing your charges for you?
Visa Operator: What do you mean you didn't order a $500 Hawaiian print shirt, Mr. Johnson? It is in exactly your size.
--Too lazy to log in
S"Q"K
If this turns out to be a single source for all information, what determines its correctness?
What if companies use that information to restrict my freedom?
I don't think that either of these issues will be addressed as long as the company's (and government's) senior executives feel that they still have their privacy. So the solution I suggest is to collect and publish as much information about all of them as possible. If we open-source their lives, I'm sure they'll come out as better people for it.
Is this more Microsoft bashing? The story mentions "Although relatively unknown in Australia, Acxiom is a $US2.5 billion company with more than 450 corporate clients, including IBM, American Express, Wal-Mart and AT&T."
/. knee-jerk Anti-MS stuff?
Microsoft is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the story. Where is the MS connection, or is this a standard
This pertains to Americans, since I don't have much experience elsewhere.
...Linux!
Privacy has been dead for a long long time. We don't really care, though many of us still spout off about the degredation of privary. Any discussion or demands for privacy in this country are purely academic. The issue as killed and buried by Corporate America long ago. All America cares about is making a buck. This is not limited to Corporations. We are a capitalist nation, everything we do is, almost by definition, for profit. The US economy is raging right now. One indicator I use of the the US economy is the cars we drive. In the 90's, especially the late 90's, the car have gotten bigger and bigger, and they eat more and more gas. The same thing happened in the swinging post WWII economy. We don't care about privary either. Telemarketing companies buy and sell personal information between themselves and others. All in the name of profit. I use a piece of plastic for almost every purchase I make; allowing my bank to know what I spend and where. Grocery stores offer club cards; in exchange for good deals, you give up some privacy. They can keep track of your purchase history. Why do we trade our privacy for a buck? Because Americans, for the most part, do not value privacy. The economy is good, our personal profits are high, so we really don't give a damn as long as we can keep filling up the 42 gallon tank of your suburbans with $1.50 gasoline that craps up the air we breath.
If we really care about privacy, there needs to be cultural change in our view of the value of privacy. This won't happen until after our privacy is exploited to the point of hurting people. When the sale of personal information prevents people from getting jobs, inssurance, food, etc. we may start to value it more. But because our privacy was sold at aution years ago, it's going to be an uphill battle to get it back.
Frankly, I don't want it back now. I'm the first the admit that I'm a raging capitalist. I'm willing to sell my privacy for profit, I carry a grocery store club card. I don't care if online bookstore know what I purchase and read. It makes my life a little more comfortable.
Andrew
--
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Evil Bill: "You see mister Bond, with the press of this button all your personal info will be broadcast to the world... and your spy career RUINED.. muhahahaha"
007: "You can't do this... you... you... you monster! Ok ok I'll talk"
Evil Bill: "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"
Blender And Linux Fan
If privacy isn't dead now, it will be very shortly.
I used to work for a company that developed medical records software, and we were approached by the Ministry of Health for Ontario, Canada. They were looking for software to put a system in place whereby all doctors in Ontario would store their patient's incredibly private information in a central location. (Our software was not designed for this purpose, but they were interested in it because of its great front-end.)
I was part of the team that trained the civil servants on the use of the software, so that they could judge its quality. After several days working together, our two groups were getting kind of chummy, so I ventured a thought towards the government's project leader. I made the suggestion that a double-blind system could be set-up, so that aggregate information about efficacy of treatments, etc., could be compiled without anyone being able to pinpoint exactly which citizen had AIDS, etc. In response, all I got was a cold, blank stare. It was obvious to me that what this government project was after was the ability to track individuals. All noble talk about creating an incredible research tool was just to make the project more palatable.
In Canada, any bank transaction valued over $1000 is tracked by the Mounties. I believe a similar law is in place in the U.S. for the FBI. These things are both pre-internet.
I'm afraid that there are no death bells tolling, since privacy died a long time ago. I'm also afraid that there is no technological solution--even PGP cannot help. The only good solution would be to have privacy solidly entrenched in law. That's definitely a long-shot, because here in Canada, with Trudeau's iteration of our constitution, the right to private property was removed. (It was a suggestion of the socialist leader of the time, Ed Broadbent, who feared a constitutional challenge to our extortionately high income taxes, which could probably be proven to be un-constitutional.)
And I don't think any Americans should believe that they have it much better, since in many states Driver's Licences can be revoked for things having nothing to do with driving, such as failing to pay child-support. I understand that in the Netherlands, according to Pulp Fiction, policeman cannot insist on searching your person. Now that's privacy law with balls! And something to strive for.
I'd even be willing to eat fries with mayo!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Someone give me $10 million, and an EMP, and I'll go take 'em out!
.AU and the one here is that the one here was totally a private operation. No goverment help, AFAIK. When the government starts asking companies to do this, and helps them, then it's time to throw a wrench into the works.
The above is a joke for the FBI afflicted!
I live roughly 10 miles away from their HQ in Conway...
The only difference between the one in
Side note:
Kinda strange to think my mom might have been one of their Database Administrators. Only problem was that she would be on call 24/7, and she would have been required to travel when asked (hmm....).
Now that governments and companies -- notably ones in Australia -- have the technology and the will to snoop on everyone and compile huge databases of detail on private citizens, stop to think who is left out of this snoop-fest. Companies and governments. Why are they special? Why are they not routinely snooped on by private citizens, and each other, with all details reported to the public at large, out our use? They collect info on us for their use. Turn it around!
We cannot put the genie back in the bottle; we cannot reverse technological and social trends and restore privacy to all citizens everywhere. But we can deny privacy to the snoops! Who will watch the watchers? We can. We will, to quote AT&T. The only rational response to steady erosion of privacy is no privacy at all, and be gung-ho about it! Lobby for laws requiring full disclosure of all government and business documents! Outlaw NDAs! Get the credit reports for corporations, public and "private." Subject corporations to the death penalty (i.e., revoke their corporate status if they commit felonies).
A single standard!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Note, that was not a Biblical reference
Michael threw a hissy-fit today about id Software sending back graphics card information and now we have this. This is a real privacy concern. The problem isn't with the information being so openly available, it's with it being so tightly controlled, not just by one organization, but by a combination organization/government body. Business/free-enterprise/commercial world is not a democracy. Once the government immerses itself in this world, some of the democratic freedoms (mostly those based on Socialist ideas) become lost as business takes over the legislative workings. This isn't lobbying we're talking about here, this is direct cooperation and the line is blurred between government and the private sector (ever see Robocop?). I don't mind businesses collecting data and I don't mind governments collecting data, but I mind them doing it together, because government cannot effectively regulate when it is part of the process (we see that too much now already).
Slashdot readers who posted over 600 comments today about video card information should open their eyes to this real problem. Whether or not the situation is exactly as it is presented here, someone (not just me) should get on the horn to consumer rights advocates right now and make sure that the world's largest conflict of interest doesn't become a reality.
I guess that I am not like most /.ers then. I was born before 1970.
but this is nothing like the info we can get in America. Trust me, it's easy. If anyone wants to submit an address I can tell you all sorts of generalities about you and the people you live with. With a few list appends I can find your phone number, car you drive, annual income, marital status, etc. etc. etc. All of this information is out there and for sale (Mostly from credit companies, they keep *very* up to date records). The company I work for buys it all the time. We do marketing. We figure out the right audience and reach them. It's rather scientific actually.
There really isn't that much to fear. There is a margin of error that will always exists. If you try hard enough you can reach it. Most list companies (as we call them) are receptive to individual requesting removal, there aren't that many. You need to realize (as much as many of you hate it) that marketing makes markets more efficient, and the U.S. (and it looks like Aussieland too) use free-market economies. This information, en masse, is worth money and so a market develops. There are limits to the information available, but nothing that couldn't be obtained from a decent private eye, to help put it in perspective.
+&x
The main section that I can remember (since AustLII doesn't appear to be up at the moment) is that you have the right to review any information held on you and ask for it to be corrected if wrong.
I am not overly concerned by people attempting to do targeted marketing or to have a profile of me to make my customer experience more worthwhile, provided it is for a specific company. For example, I like having account records for the phone company so that they can suggets I change to a different mobile phone charging plan to save me money. It's a lot like having the waiters/waitresses at my local Italian restaurant knowing what I usually order. I get good service, and they get repeat business. This is good for both sides.
What I don't like is for a private company to gather information from disparate sources, throw it into a database and sell the extracted information to someone else that I may or may not have had any previous dealings with. If you check the fine print on most forms, there is a little section which says "If you sign this you agree to let us give/sell this information to a certain select few groups (eg: police)", so I have, in a roundabout sort of way, given my permissions to have this information gathered. of course, not signing the form denies me the services of that company, which is akin to blackmail in my mind.
What is more concerning is that with the speed of SMP computing and some rather funky algorithms it is possible to glean a great deal of information from trend analysis and similar techniques. This is information that you have not explicitly provided, but which has been deduced from your spending habits, amount of insurance, type of car, marital status, credit rating, etc.
Now I'm sure most of the uses for this information will be benign (if annoying) things like directed advertising, because the majority of people aren't interesting enough to be subjected to the wild schemes others here have concocted. A few will be though, and reality is often stranger than fiction. I don't want to be the guinea pig for one of those schemes. I want the opportunity to opt out, which should be my right as a consumer. Others may not be bothered by this company's motives. Fine. Let them remain in the database. I want out though.
If I am not given that option, then I may need to start taking subversive (yet amusing) action. A few random thoughts (please comment if you really are a lawyer):
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
I understand most people's concerns about this issue, but I'm not sure everyone realizes certain things. For example, most information (especially in the U.S.) that Acxiom gathers results from public information at most courthouses. Anyone in the world can walk in and request most of this info. (Yes, that IS scary.) Other info. is gathered from *public* purchases. Unless you explicitly say, "Don't let anyone know about this," it's perfectly legal for a corporation with whom you've dealt to spread their data on you.
:), but in actuality, most of the data held by Acxiom is completely public. The only way to not let this information about yourselves out is to live like the Unabomber.
As for Acxiom, I have recently worked there as a software engineering intern. The people I worked with were great and understand that some folks freak out about this stuff. And, they *DO* have ways to "opt out" of their massive DB's (Admittedly, it's not well publicized.)
As someone else mentioned, it'd be nice to quit receiving those #$^@-ing AOL CD's, which is precisely what Acxiom tries to do in many cases. It's intended to save corporations $$ on mailings and free product offerings by collecting data for precision marketing.
I understand everyone's paranoia to a certain degree (I'm paranoid, too
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Mark Staggs
I'm a software developer at a large US Auto Insurence Company (which shall remain nameless.... but if you call us we'll give you the rates of two other companies, sometimes we're the lowest, sometimes we're not). In my first month on the job I found that privacy is already dead in the United States. Data Warehouses have everything on you already that you can think of. They keep track of who lives in what house with whom and anything that you ever bought with a credit card. I used to be a big privacy advocate.... but I've given up that fight. Its a battle lost long ago.
For all those who have been saying how shitty a place Australia must be to live, given the events of the last few months, you may want to get a little introspective.
I could turn around and say "Americans profile their own school children to weed our the mass murderers? Danm the United States must suck!"
On the whole, Australia is a great place to live.
It's open, relatively in touch with what is happening around the world and, for the most part, consists of an extremely diverse set of people and cultures, who generally get along very well.
At the moment, however, we have an overly conservative government in place, thanks to the economic hardships of the previous decade, (global recession etc). They're currently doing all of the things that overly conservative governments do everywhere around the world (and stepping on toes in the process while claiming a greater good)
In the not too distant future, however, there will be an election, and this overly conservative government will be tossed out having pissed too many people off, as it almost was in the last election, and Australia will be the better for it.
I am not entirely familiar with the US system of government - but if the US had a republican president and a predominantly republican congress and senate, wouldn't the US be in a similar situation right now?
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
http://www.cnn.com/US/9 911/29/internet.murder.ap/index.html
The killer used online research agencies to find out information about his target. The killer even advises: "It's actually obsene (sic) what you can find out about people on the Internet".
Take his advice: refuse this gross invasion of privacy.
I think the real issue is not whether people have this information or not, they are going to have it and in many ways it does us more good than harm as long as we dont do anything wrong. I think the main problem is that if such information is going to be available it should be FREELY available to everyone, its not unlike the issues of free software, free documentation, free education
Well, one way to handle something like this is start gathering and making information available on the gatherers. The problems with this sort of snooping arise because there is an imbalance present. You may not have any privacy, but if they don't either the tendency to misue the information would be in fact tempered by knowledge that reciprocal misuse could be just as painful.
There is an interesting and comprehesive discussion of this concept in David Brin's 'The Transparent Society'.
About 10 years ago, I created an "artificial" family. A wife, two kids, hobbies, etc... all fictional. I based it on my roommates in college at the time.
I use this fictional family whenever anyone asks for personal information. Warranty cards, whatever, I fill it all out.
A few years ago, my brother, who works for one of the major credit card companies, was testing out a new consumer database that someone was trying to sell them. The vendor was bragging about how accurate the database was, that it was based on the most current public information, etc... So how do you test something like that? Feed in family members, of course.
So my brother calls me and says "Todd, why does this database show that you have a wife and two kids?" 8-)
I agree with the sentiments voiced so far:
- currently, it's an easy system to jam
- you probably volunteered the information in the first place
- i'd rather see an "opt-in only" law rather than any form of serious government regulation. If I want to trade my privacy for convenience, that's my right! In the words of the Dead Kennedy's, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!
-Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
- Apple have always referred to me as Ms since I bought an orignal Newton Message Pad
- A local coin collectors place used to refer to my mother and I as Dr & Ms C & J Johnson - but she's the doctor. When I corrected them the next mailout arrived as Dr C & Ms J Johnson.
- My mother and I have swapped our flybuys cards. This means they think I regularly buy petrol, but I don't own a car
- There is a Mr Chris Johnson who works in a surgical centre at 39 the street I live in - I live at 31. I've been getting his calls and mail.
- Many American web-based services think I live in Washington, USA - I live in Western Australia, Australia (WA).
And these are just the ones I know about - yet these places build these data warehouses in the belief that they're Right, they're The Truth. That's what worries me. We don't need the right the view or delete the data, we need the right to fix it.I don't think it's really accurate to describe the Australia card as being a similar scheme to this. It was a fair while time ago, so my recollection is rather fuzzy but I believe the Australia card was supposed to be a universal ID and index for government services. I think it was to be fairly similar in concept to the French ID card (which has been around for quite some time, and as far as I know is not massively unpopular).
While that certainly has privacy concerns it wasn't, unlike this scheme, about collecting data for the express purpose of selling market information. While having large government databases with personal information is a cause for concern, to my mind having similar privately held databases is much, much worse.
There have been signs of these portents in Australia for months.
First, gun control.
Now privacy.
The horror began a long time ago.
It'll happen here when I'm no longer able to use
my index finger to send rounds down range...
Ever since that slashdot article on cookies in ad banners (I recommend reading it if you haven't already -- it is here: http://slashdot.org/yro/99/10/22/0249212.shtml) I've been thinking of ways to make it hard to track me via cookies. I'd like to automate something so I wouldn't have to do it by hand. What I do currently is edit ~/.netscape/cookies in emacs while browsing, and randomly change things. I set any dates I see to be right after Y2K, to help them in their testing, and transpose blocks of letters.
(Another post below observed how much of the information mined is wrong -- titles and address wrong, for instance. I always give a mangled address to the Radio Shack people who insist on asking for it when you make a purchase. I know someone who was called for a political poll, and instinctively lied to say he was supporting the underdog, figuring it was in his interest to see the front-runner campaign a little harder. I think it is in our interest to lie as much as possible to these sorts of people. Hey, I just convinced myself to go to the local grocery store and sign up for some fake discount cards.)
But anyway, back to cookie-diddling. What I want to do is write a shell script wrapper that spawns of netscape and a second process, which watches the cookie file and does the following sorts of things:
-- I want it to keep a number (say, fifty) New York Times account passwords and usernames. As I browse the nytimes.com, it should switch them in and out at random from the cookie file. This way, nytimes.com sees a number of users making random deep requests into the site, and cannot track the series of articles I read. It should be able to occasionally abandon a username password and pick up a new one automatically.
-- Play with advertiser banner ad cookies: either scramble them and let the site retrieve them, or better yet, somehow trade ad cookies back and forth with several users, thus mixing our viewing histories. The more people the better. Maybe we can set up some type of server that everyone can use.
-- Retrieve new cookies off the web that don't represent a page view, and allow them to be retrieved by the site later. It could submit a randomly choosen dictionary word to yahoo or alltheweb and crawl those links til it got some nice cookies, and toss them in the cookies file. In fact, writing a continuous low-level background task to do this all the time might be good too.
-- Finally, I want to be able to view some sort of statistics on what sites set the most cookies, how often they retrieve them, etc. Basically, the problem here is that I can't get a good idea of what information they are collecting. I can set netscape to pop the annoying little window everytime someone wants to set a cookie, but I'd like to log when they are retrieved as well. Anyone know how to track that ?
I think my last point is the most useful. While engaging a little guerilla war with data miners might be interesting for a while, what would bring real change is if the major browsers automatically kept track of them keeping track of you and allowed you to view the information in an understandable form. This might upset enough people that things would actually change -- those trusting techno-impaired out there would see this and begin to modify their buying practices.
If anyone out there has already written this sort of thing, could you please share, rather than making me re-write it ?
--Rob