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We need to lobby Congress and hire lawyers to represent us against the companies who sell our data and information. I would start with us being able to charge these companies royalties when they use our personal data and or name when they sell the information.

Have to say, I was skeptical of the FB stock offering on the basis that I doubted the data collection could be monetized on FB's own service (do people really want to think about ads when sharing with family?) but the financial proposition becomes much more interesting when FB aggregates its own user data to sell targeted advertising everyplace else on the internet. Obviously this raises disclosure and other public policy issues, but the world seems to be full of chatty folks who don't mind at all.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. The thought police is here.
Read the book "1984." The future of no individuality, no privacy has come.

jstatum, on 26 June 2012 - 03:17 PM, said:

You are quite right but the problem is that corporate lobbyists and sponsors make our elected representatives answerable to them not to the voters.

Having to know to go to BlueCava's website to unsubscribe from their Device ID is like having to know that a police force has installed a GPS tracker on your car and going to the right police force to ask them to remove it. That is not what the Supreme Court said.

Lots of claims and scary scenarios, but a total dearth of proof.

Show us one record of one individual from one "hyper-connected" illegal database, and I'll stop considering this article a grandstanding scare tactic to gain readership and clicks.

The author posits a science-fiction "dataverse" where evil powers magically penetrate your Social Security file, credit cards, insurance and med records, your many usernames and passwords and, btw, know all your IP and MAC addresses.

Then they unerringly mash these all together--avoiding the common db mess-ups that plague db adminners worldwide--in a database ten times the size of the IRS's with bigger servers than Google's.

And all to learn that $6/hour Wal-Mart clerk Joe Schmedley bought a bass boat instead of paying his rent.

Sorry, you don't make your case.

jstatum, on 26 June 2012 - 03:17 PM, said:

Yes, we need more data laws, tax laws, greed laws, smoking laws, gun laws, child-raising laws, and double-parking laws.

Good story and then I checked my tracker blocker, seems PC mag has shot 9 trackers my way. We also must understand a new generation of folks not very well educated in right to privacy or such nor overly technical just blundering about saying "What's the big deal?"

GrossTyro, on 03 July 2012 - 10:07 AM, said:

The numbe is 11 according to my tracker blocker. The total number is not in argument, just an observation.

fwfmfw1, on 04 July 2012 - 06:51 AM, said:

Just an observation. Today when I read this informative article and was amazed that 9 people did not think it was worth recommending!
Who might think that?

George Orwell was right. He was just off by 20 years. In addition, the biggest threat comes not from government but from so-called private companies (I guess with the Supreme Court Citizens United decision the corporations ARE THE GOVERNMENT - they buy and sell the politicians in their interests only).