This, I feel, is precisely why it should not be necessary to make a law forcing business into the practice of selling to anonymous individuals. At any rate, in my experience, most of the reason that companies need all that information is to comply with existing government regulations that they must collect that information, or obvious reasons that make collecting the information applicable to the product that is being sold (for example, so that they can send you bills for a service you are buying). If a company demands information that I do not wish to give, I generally go somewhere else. Furthermore, I am never comfortable with laws telling people who they must or must not do business with.
Fine, Orwell was wrong. But there still remain two obvious errors in this article: 1) the tacit equation of personal liberty with democracy; 2) the fact that government has continued to find ways to erode personal liberties in spite of the availability of technology. So what if we're not living under a communist regime? Consider, for example, that a social democracy is every bit as unfriendly to personal liberty as communism is...
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This, I feel, is precisely why it should not be necessary to make a law forcing business into the practice of selling to anonymous individuals. At any rate, in my experience, most of the reason that companies need all that information is to comply with existing government regulations that they must collect that information, or obvious reasons that make collecting the information applicable to the product that is being sold (for example, so that they can send you bills for a service you are buying). If a company demands information that I do not wish to give, I generally go somewhere else. Furthermore, I am never comfortable with laws telling people who they must or must not do business with.
Fine, Orwell was wrong. But there still remain two obvious errors in this article: 1) the tacit equation of personal liberty with democracy; 2) the fact that government has continued to find ways to erode personal liberties in spite of the availability of technology. So what if we're not living under a communist regime? Consider, for example, that a social democracy is every bit as unfriendly to personal liberty as communism is...