$640.00 to fill the tanks...

Martin Hotze wrote:
On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 05:35:51 GMT, Matt Whiting wrote:


It is not =my= shopping at WalMart

that invades my privacy, it is the result of =other= people shopping
there that does.

This makes no sense at all. How so?


profiling.

profiling can also be done with knowing all the facts about the people
around you. eg: the percentage of dogfood sold in your neighborhood is
higher than average. Then one can assume that you too might have a dog
(without knowing that you buy dogfood).

Bunk. Assuming stuff about me doesn't invade my privacy. People had
done that for centuries. It is called gossip.

I never realized that Wal-Mart generated so much paranoia.

Matt

profiling can also be done with knowing all the facts about the people
around you. eg: the percentage of dogfood sold in your neighborhood is
higher than average. Then one can assume that you too might have a dog
(without knowing that you buy dogfood).


Bunk. Assuming stuff about me doesn't invade my privacy. People had done that for centuries. It is called gossip.

That depends on how reliable the assumptions are, and what the
consequences are. With networked computers doing the assuming, and the
consequenting, you may find that your life is "personalized for your
benefit" by entities over which you have no control.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jose wrote:
profiling can also be done with knowing all the facts about the people
around you. eg: the percentage of dogfood sold in your neighborhood is
higher than average. Then one can assume that you too might have a dog
(without knowing that you buy dogfood).



Bunk. Assuming stuff about me doesn't invade my privacy. People had
done that for centuries. It is called gossip.


That depends on how reliable the assumptions are, and what the
consequences are. With networked computers doing the assuming, and the
consequenting, you may find that your life is "personalized for your
benefit" by entities over which you have no control.

I'm not sure which is worse: the real privacy issues or the paranoia
about the privacy issues.

Matt

I'm not sure which is worse: the real privacy issues or the paranoia about the privacy issues.

The real privacy issues are.

Take yourself back fifteen years and imagine people predicting that just
going on the web would be a privacy concern, and that visiting a doctor
would be a privacy issue... you'd probably be laughed at as a tin hat.
But even something as innocuous as small text files (cookies) have
become mighty powerful invasions. Viruses were all but unknown fifteen
years ago, and anybody who predicted that opening an Email could be
dangerous was roundly thumped. Now we have companies like SONY actively
putting trojan horses and rootkits in their own mass market items that
monitor your file transfers and decide whether or not you should be
permitted to accomplish them, and Amazon giving out "personalized
prices" (guess where that comes from) when you visit them. When
journalism is under the entertainment division, it's not too hard to
imagine articles being written in such a way that they read differently
depending on who accesses the web site, and what their browsing history is.

It's not paranoia. It's real.

That is not to say that there is a man behind the curtain pulling all
the levers. However, having the machine pull the levers by itself is an
even bigger problem.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.