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Re: you're priceless

Anita wrote:
> Of *course* it's a marketing thing... isn't everything these days?
> ;)  I don't think it's any more nefarious than that, however. 

Isn't that enough?  I loathe being bombarded with advertisements.  That's one
of the reasons I gave up television.  I don't like the consumerist culture that
hammers and hammers at you to buy, buy, BUY!  I buy the things I want, when I
want them, and I don't want unsoliced ads trying to get me to buy more.  I
don't care how useful it is, I don't care how thoroughly it's been targeted to
exactly my lifestyle.  If I didn't ask to hear about it, I don't want the ad.
In fact, I refuse to patronize merchants that engage in such practices, because
I don't want to encourage them.  Put the information in a publically accessible
and convenient place, so that when I go looking for it, I'll find it.  Do not
shove it under my nose unasked for.  I would love to outlaw telemarketing.
Instead I turned off my landline.

> It's just about exactly like the "We'll send you coupons for only the
> products you use" kind of surveys that my mother is always sending in... it's
> why she gets so many catalogs!

And I don't want them.  I don't want the wasted paper, I don't want the wasted
work by the postal service (although probably if there were no junk mail,
postage for private mail would get really expensive, right?  So am I being
hypocritcal?  Hmmmm....), I just loathe the waste, in general.  How many trees
had to die?  How much waste came out of the pulping and printing process?  All
to send me a catalog that I chuck in the trash without even looking at.  How
many landfills?  Well, I recycle, but still, that can't be done indefinitely,
and not many catalogs are printed on recycled paper.

There is a deeply disturbing possible outcome to all this, as more and more
information comes on-line.  Computers are pretty good at finding patterns, if
not as good as humans (we even invent them when they're not there), and they're
getting better.  The loss of privacy initially may not seem like much of a deal
(so they know your weight; big deal), but once enough data gets out there, they
can correlate all kinds of things and project things about you that you might
not want them to know.  I read an article that described a scenario where you
buy two airplane tickets and book a hotel room at your destination city.  A
computer puts two and two together and you find the lcd display on the back of
the seat in front of you on the airplane start to show you ads for jewelers
near your hotel offering specials on engagement rings.  Or sexual aide stores,
who knows?  And when you get home, you find someone had hacked that database,
knew you'd be gone, and ransacked your house.  And that's just the tip of the
iceberg.  

And I'm not really paranoid.  Really.  :-)
-- 
Don Smith                          Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are
to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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