NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[jill]

Hello,
Here's the solution. go to the library, surf the web, register a bogus
yahoo email address, and let the cookies be placed on! surf and register to
your hearts desire. I believe there is need to be more than one identity
for each person. One, the identity that enjoys only mail that is requested.
The other, a junk repository for all other mail. All you have to do each
week or so is open it and delete ALL.  

Spencer Thiel wrote:
> 
> At 04:18 PM 7/6/00 -0500, JEANNIE BERNIER wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >How marketing tracking (internet and otherwise) really works:
> >
> >Scenario 1:  Bob goes to Yahoo.  Bob sees a banner ad for Joe's Golf
> >Emporium.  Bob clicks on the banner ad.  This banner ad was served by
> >Double-Click.  Bob is transferred over to Joe's Golf Emporium, where a
> >cookie gets placed on his computer.  This cookie contains his IP address.
> >Bob decides Joe's Golf Emporium is a big ripoff so he leaves without buying
> >anything.
> 
> This is almost but not quite right.  The cookie from, say, DoubleClick, is
> placed on the hard drive when the user first loads the page.  They don't
> have to click on anything.
> 
> >Q:  What does Joe's Golf Emporium now know about Bob?
> >A:  Abso-f*cking-lutely nothing, other than his IP address, which may or may
> >not be consistent from session to session, and maybe the fact that he came
> >from Yahoo, because that's the address in the referral URL.
> 
> This is just flat out wrong.  Much information can be determined -- even
> before the stupid cookie is placed on Bob's computer, like area code, zip
> code, state, etc.., just from the IP address.  Just because you don't know
> how to read an IP address, it doesn't mean that other's don't.  DoubleClick
> and almost any other on-line advertising agency advertises that you can use
> their system to target ads by all sorts of categories -- pretty much
> everything except your sex, weight, and height.  But if you were suckered
> in to entering this information in to a web site when you registered, they
> can take care of this also.
> 
> >They may also be able to look at the log files, find his username, and know
> >that he came from Yahoo, he looked at 14 different clubs before he bought
> >one, and then he left the site.  Notice, once Bob leaves the site, he
> >disappears from the log files,
> 
> What?  Where are you getting this information from?  This is wrong
> also.  If you logged on to www.website.com, clicked around, chatted, and
> left the site, one could very easily find out how long you stayed on each
> page, what you typed into the chat room, what you bought, and where you
> went once you left.  I could do this 20 years after you visited the site if
> I was so inclined.
> 
> >The moral of the story - they know a lot less about you on the internet than
> >anywhere else.  And what they know elsewhere ain't much.  But the "media"
> >(ooh, I have to find a new word!)  has us believe that corporations know our
> >high school math grades, that we had a skin cancer scare last year, that we
> >have $4.36 in our bank account, etc. etc.  It just isn't so.
> 
> This is probably true.  However there is absolutely no denying that
> marketers would like to know this information, and the Internet has been a
> dream come true for many marketers.
> 
> >Mostly what
> >corporations know about you is the stuff you tell them, and most ethical
> >organizations have policies to prevent abuse of internal information.
> 
> Name one ethical corporation.
> 
> My $0.02:
> 
> Cookies were never intended to be used to snoop out information about
> users.  This is entirely thanks to marketers.  It's a wonderful technology
> that has been exploited to no end by those who desire information.
> 
> And another thing, marketers just don't understand it's not what kind of
> information is being gathered that makes people uncomfortable.  It's that
> anything is being gathered at all without our knowledge.
> - st.