What Data Mining Firms Know About You 141
storagedude writes "Time writer Joel Stein spent three months learning what data mining companies know about him. After learning everything the companies had profiled about him (some of it inaccurate) — social security number, age, marital status, religion, income, debt, interests, browsing and spending habits — he had a surprising reaction: complacency. '... oddly, the more I learned about data mining, the less concerned I was. Sure, I was surprised that all these companies are actually keeping permanent files on me. But I don't think they will do anything with them that does me any harm. There should be protections for vulnerable groups, and a government-enforced opt-out mechanism would be great for accountability. But I'm pretty sure that, like me, most people won't use that option. Of the people who actually find the Ads Preferences page — and these must be people pretty into privacy — only 1 in 8 asks to opt out of being tracked. The rest, apparently, just like to read privacy rules."
Complacency is dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't trust any company is goal is to make a profit. Full stop.
Re:Complacency is dangerous (Score:4, Interesting)
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One of the main concerns isn't if the company itself is stealing your information, but how securely are they keeping your information?
Trust comes into play when a company is keeping all this sensitive information, but is not competent of the security measures it should be taking to protect it's (my) data from malicious intrusions.
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Keep what safe? the info which is readily available from a plethora of companies which will find you, track you, inform of others of your credit rating.
Security, as always, is a matter of the cost of obtaining the info - given enough money/time budget nothing is secure. But... in a real world, the budget is inherently limited
The higher the cost for "them" (interested of getting the info), the lower the cost for me to protect the info. Seems like the balance is now shifted towards "them". The way TFA (which quotes somebody else) puts it: "You were private by default and public by effort. Nowadays, you're public by default and private by effort," says Lee Ti
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Dead Wrong.
When the other business model fails, the company will sell its profiles and its 4 members will disperse into 4 new organizations.
Crazy random example. I went to NBC because because of ratings they cut the series of The Cape from 13 to 9+ an online finale. The trackers of that base NBC site (per Ghostery) are:
AddThis
BlueKai
Comscore Beacon
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Floodlight
Facebook Connect
Krux Digital
Mindset Media
Omniture
Quanticast
Revenue Science
Rubicon
Paul Thurrott's site as a totally different list
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Re:Next Big Thing (Score:2)
Neat post -
I'm only a low-grade prophet - not good enough to start my own religion. More like "gee, I knew someone one who said something... ooh look, a new episode of Secrets Of Our Lives is on!" I didn't see Facebook coming either even though we knew MySpace was dead.
I can't see ahead to the Next Big Thing that people like/Like. Anyone really think they know what the Next Big Thing after Facebook is?
"Trust doesn't necessarily come into play...." (Score:2)
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No, the company is a legal entity, quite possible the immortal sociopathic form of legal person known as a corporation.
One of my girlfriends works for Bank of America. She, and her co-workers I've met, are great. Yet the corporation is an evil corporate bastard.
How can a structure of great people turn out evil? The same way a structure of unconscious nerve cells can turn out to have a consciousness. The evil that a company does is (usually) an emergent property. It's not en
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And the crew on the Death Star were just innocent bystanders.
Either your girlfriend is a bad person, or the corporation itself isn't so bad. Or you're a liar. But you can't have your cake and call it poisoned, too.
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"...I run the Death Star..."
"What's the Death Star?"
"THIS is the Death Star. You're IN the Death Star. I run this star."
"This is a star?"
"This is a fucking star! I run it! I'm your boss!"
"You're Mr. Stevens?"
"..."
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Bull$#!%. The Empire was already in more or less total control of the galaxy (at least, the civilized parts). There weren't any external threats to the Empire when the Death Star was being built (the rebellion at that point was a bunch of pissant nobodies, that would promote anyone who walked into a strategery meeting to "General", that hardly justified the trouble of building a DS), therefore its use was purely offensive, first-strike Evil. It was Pearl Harbor, not Hiroshima.
And everyone in the Galaxy knew
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Thanks for the info. The ad offered a good price on a range you knew about from work.
I'm just thinking that if there were no ads would you have still considered that option, and would you have been able to find a good & cheap vendor from a search-engine search or a price-comparison site; and if you weren't already familiar with the model, without ads would there still be good places to read up about them?
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Although I am all for targeted ads, but it is a lot more likely that you have paid $1000 for a $1200 or even a $900 laptop. Shockingly, few retailers are willing to sell items at less than 50% of their price. Not unless they triple the retail price first.
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Re:Complacency is dangerous (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you got a $1000 laptop for $1000, but through the magic of marketing, you believe the value of the laptop to be $2500.
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Here's how to target ads to people.... if the website is about flying small prop planes, present ads about small prop planes. If it's a fishing website, advertise a fishing pole.
And if it is /.?
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Advertise asbestos suits.
The threat is in the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
The threat isn't what they are going to do with your data; it is the potential that it presents.
Sure, there is no reason why they are going to one day say, "Hey! Let's look at So-and-so's record and see what we can do to him as a result."
However, what can happen is that one day you become a "person of interest" to someone somewhere for some reason (quite possibly entirely by mistake). Then you can expect that that entity is going to buy all the data they can on you and sift through every detail of it.
And don't forget that once this data exists, it pretty much never goes away. Terabytes are incredibly cheap these days, and data companies most likely invest in lots of backup and redundancy.
P.S. For kicks, also think about what may happen if such a company gets hacked. Enjoy.
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P.S. For kicks, also think about what may happen if such a company gets hacked. Enjoy.
is this greater or less than the risk of someone stealing your wallet, or breaking into your house and stealing your things?
I guess what it means is that the people who should be most worried about this stuff is those with the most to hide. Nothing wrong with that either, just trying to put some meaning into it.
I mean, its not like we have a choice. Either live like a hermit, in which case your quality of life suffers, or risk having your data stolen (albeit, a very small risk) at which point your quality
joel stein is an idiot (Score:2)
not surprised that he writes for TIME, that learned journal. but telling us not to worry makes him an asshole, as well.
*
how can you be complacent learning that companies you don't do business with are keeping records on you of who you've done business with, and also knowing that hackers can hack into anything they want? "here's a good target: that company who keeps databases with all the information on everybody."
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Even if they want to sell you stuff you can actually use? I'd rather get fed ads for products I'd buy than ads for products I have no interest in at all.
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Opt Out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Hitler, I'm Jewish and I would like to opt-out of your anti-semitism movement. Thanks!
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Just wear sis little yellow tagen, so ve know sat you optend out. Ja?
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Fred Hitler? The head of catering?
What they know about me (Score:5, Funny)
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They know that I am female, 16, blond, my email address is billg@microsoft.com, and that I might not always be completely truthful in filling out web forms!
the sentence you wrote tells a lot about you already. :)
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I too have a strange passion for filling in web forms with the most outrageous options available.
I am often a 110 year old woman from Mongolia.
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I'm a 98 year old woman in Afghanistan.
Or at least as far as the NYT knows.
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How's the arthritis?
Doesn't help you (Score:2)
I might not always be completely truthful in filling out web forms!
That doesn't help you much. If you are a real adult with a mortgage, credit card, a deed, and some other public records, they can sell all of that "real world" information about you.
Sure, I'm a 14 y.o. girl who likes ponies. But I'm also a guy with a house and a job that creates a public trail. It's just a matter of time till they can merge the two.
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Sure, I'm a 14 y.o. girl who likes ponies. But I'm also a guy with a house and a job that creates a public trail. It's just a matter of time till they can merge the two.
You might want to be a bit careful. The way things are going, you're liable to get arrested for talking to yourself.
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Indeed. The truth is that you're actually a blood elf female over the age of consent who just happens to share Bill Gates's email address. Which means you've got a nice set of...ears and I would totally hit that.
(I've considered opting out of those profile-cookie-things, but some of the demogs they've lumped me in are so horribly wrong, that from what Google et al. tell me opting out would probably bring them closer to knowing the real me
What Data Mining Firms Know About You (Score:5, Insightful)
Of the people who actually find the Ads Preferences page — and these must be people pretty into privacy — only 1 in 8 asks to opt out of being tracked.
That's probably because people who are into privacy know that opting out will most likely show up in somebody else's DB as another data point, i.e. somebody who's concerned about privacy.
Personally I'm more comfortable using no script, adlock plus, proxies, etc.
Re:What Data Mining Firms Know About You (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was talking to someone who used to rank pretty high in the FBI. I was joking with him about my file. And no, as far as I know, he never pulled any strings to find out if I do have a file.
We joked about a few things, and then I told him the things that would show up. Have you ever been fingerprinted for something that goes federal? That would include serving in the military, holding a handgun permit, concealed weapons permit, or in some states simply purchasing a handgun.
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Um, isn't Joel Stein the guy who does the comedy sketch on the very last page of TIME?
Um, yeah.
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Maybe it's my internet marketing background, but when I read about a 12% conversion rate of interested people reaching a page, I don't think "hey, these people don't want to opt out," I think "hey, this website has some serious usability issues."
Here's what I experienced: Found the opt out page [networkadvertising.org], hit select all, and clicked submit to opt out. I was taken a page with ~50 little messages saying "You have successfully opted out from this network." It wasn't until I scrolled down to the very bottom (passed all t
Missing the danger... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't what the data mining companies would do with the data, themselves. I don't think it's even with what companies who buy their services would do, frankly...although I know that on Slashdot that may not be a widely-held or even popular belief. What's dangerous is that the data mining companies also provide data to the government. And why is that? Because the data mining companies collect and compile data that our government is forbidden from collecting directly without having to get legal authorization (like a warrant, for example). It's a workaround that circumvents controls meant to protect the privacy of individuals from their own rulers. Of course, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone in the USA; when it comes to civil rights, your mileage may vary.
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Is there documentation that the government is buying this data?
A FOIA request should at least be able to get the purchase authorizations.
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What's dangerous is that the data mining companies also provide data to the government
In some cases, these firms are actually getting data from the government. I don't exist on facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin, or any other social networking site. Yet at least one of these companies has a fair bit of information on me that they are showing off to the public; my full name, my approximate age, my physical address, my marital status, the number of people in my house, etc. I've also never had a land line in my house, so there was no way to
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People are so freaking selfish - all anyone is considering is themselves. What about future humans? Will future generations oppressed due to the data that lives in the machines curse our generation for being so complacent?
Bottom line is nobody knows, or could even begin to understand,
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What's dangerous is that the data mining companies also provide data to the government.
Oh really ? If the government wants to know about you, it has access to police files, medical records, banking accounts. I would be very worried that the other way around happen : government giving information to companies about my medical conditions, the car I own, my water consumption, etc..
Right now, I think that data mining companies know about me about the same thing I would tell to any person willing to drink a beer with me and to hear the boring story of my life : age, education, hobbies, occupatio
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most adults also seem to forget that their social structures are hardly more developed than they were in high school. cliques, cliches, stereotypes, and fallacies abound, especially when individuals in a group make judgements about a potential recruit (say a new employee). this is why personal information should be in the control of the person who it belongs to.
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What's that quote I've seen on slashdot? Something along the lines of "in Soviet Russia, government controls the commmerce." Excuse me for sounding like a liberal dou
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corporations can't (yet) imprison you against your will.. they still have to expend rather large amounts of resources to convince the government to do so. piss off the right government official however, and your life is over. I'd say both are two sides of the same shitty coin. combined is where the real toxicity to freedom comes from.
Shocking... (Score:3)
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... not filling out random forms on the internet with personal information to win a free iPod.
Fill out this form to receive a free Ipod
Name:
SSN
Bank Info
Address
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DOB: 08 Jan 1935
SSN: 409-52-2002
Address: Elvis Presley Boulevard
Memphis, TN 38116 (Graceland)
DL # 2571459
Real info works much better than any fake stuff you could make up!
Missing the important question... (Score:2)
However, they came up with all of that without using facebook (as I don't have a facebook account) or a phone book (as we have never had a land line at our hou
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Do you have credit or bank accounts?
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They do get a lot of information from the Government.
Property records.
Court Records, criminal
Court Records, civil [marriage, divorce, etc]
They do get a lot of information from the Government.
Property records.
Court Records, criminal
Court Records, civil [marriage, divorce, Probate, etc]
All of this is, and has always been, public informa
DMV (Score:2)
California DMV will not sell that info. In the wake of the Reecca Schaeffer [wikipedia.org] murder, it became illegal for the CA DMV to sell private addresses.
Can they be held accountable for security breeches (Score:2)
I have no problem with them having my info (after all, it's gun ownership, not laws, that protect us from the rise of Hitler in our country). And if I have to see ads I prefer targeted ones.
But what happens if one of these companies gets hacked and, as a result, someone uses my name and ssn for things that harm my credit score? My company's human resources department is scared stiff about accidentally disclosing that type of info in a security breech. And I imagine the same is true for companies who have it
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Things have gotten so bad I'm wearing security breeches and suspenders!
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Things have gotten so bad I'm wearing security breeches and suspenders!
It's getting expensive already, eh?
"You were private by default and public by effort. Nowadays, you're public by default and private by effort," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
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Better would be laws that made it more difficult for banks and other financial institutions to try to hold a third party responsible when they are the victims of fraud.
The really nice thing about such laws is that someone having your name and "secret" number probably wouldn't be able to use it to open an account, so it wouldn't be such a problem that the number isn't at all a secret.
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"after all, it's gun ownership, not laws, that protect us from the rise of Hitler in our country"
I'd argue that guns have little to do with this, as does user information. In Nazi Germany, people were misled into thinking they were in the right. The Germans aren't/weren't evil people. They are people like everywhere else, and people are easily manipulates/misled. That's why the "fair and balanced" media scares me. All you have to do to get people to comply with unspeakable horrors is convince them they
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And more importantly, we need laws that help track down the source of identity theft so I can hold such companies accountable. Something like any company who collects personal information on American citizens must register with some federal bureau and list what they collect. Victims of identity theft should be able to request what information any company in the list has on them, as well as a list of when, how, and to whom it was disclosed.
Yeap, definitely. Is a win-win situation: an overzealous bureaucrat (say, in "Homeland security dept"?) will know where to go for extra information on you without spending too much of your tax.
Except... it may be you to spend your money on lawyers - if you'll be permitted to have one - but the govt and data miners will be in the win.
I just wait for the Insurance companies to ... (Score:3)
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Re:I just wait for the Insurance companies to ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny how some people rage against the government for being less efficient than the private sector (which it is not) and then turn around and get paranoid about how this supposedly inept bunch of keystone cops is going to pull off some incredibly complex fascist task.
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There you go, trying to use logic again.
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government doesn't need to be efficient to pull off a fascist state. it just needs the right leadership and sufficient time.
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He's either doing some sort of performance art or completely serious about such a scheme being a good thing.
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- Robert J. Hanlon
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I think even the most rabid authoritarian would be happy to tax the meat without worrying too much about who eats it.
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I think even the most rabid authoritarian would be happy to tax the meat without worrying too much about who eats it.
Why stop there, if you can squeeze more from the same meat, without a sweat?
You see, there's a "justification" for that: use the meat together with fats and its becoming "unhealthy". The same with smoking. I'm sure the tobacco farmers pay their taxes and the ciggies manufacturer pays much more only because they produce something for "slow self poisoning - resulting in increased cost the social health services" (not that the extra collected money are guaranteed to be used for public health services anyway).
Joel Stein == 1D10T (Score:3)
But I don't think they will do anything with them that does me any harm
Which part about social security number, age, marital status, religion, income, debt, interests, browsing and spending habits did he not understand. All that info would give someone a sure fire way to steal their identity.
And you trust them with this information? (Score:2)
Okay, Mr. Stein, let's assume that all those companies have your information, and won't do anything nefarious with it.
Now, how many of those companies do you think actually keep that information secure? At how many of those companies could you just walk off with data? How many would allow you to view this data with an afternoon's worth of craft
Better just get used to it (Score:3)
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Data mining companies have already deduced from your slashdot ID's that you're probably still a virgin!
Shhhh...don't tell my wife ;)
How accurate is their data? (Score:2)
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... I am female, 16, blond, my email address is billg@microsoft.com
Wait! That's not you?!!
--
And batshit-crazy people without guns bite!
Correction. (Score:1)
I meant the sig to be a joke about batshit-crazy people, but after posting I realized it probably looks like an anti-gun comment about your sig, which I did not intend it to be.
I get your sig that it's the bs-c people.
Very interesting article (Score:1)
I for one thought it was a very interesting article. I encourage you all to actually read it.
I particularly liked the part about Google's separation of data. Its an interesting look at the way that company, who's efforts are all funded by our personal data, is run. Nice peek inside a world I wouldn't get to see otherwise.
Actually a random thought just occurred to me, if everyone was as concerned about privacy as slashdotters, would Google still have been successful enough to launch Android? Without personal
opting out (Score:1)
I have trouble counting down... (Score:1)
... and I can count pretty high.
Maybe it has to do with my starting point...
Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall, aleph-null bottles of beer...
...
take one down and pass it around, Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall.
It's not what they know about me (Score:2)
Just looking to separate you from your money (Score:1)
As others have commented, I too don't like how easily they can get information that could be used to steal my identity, nor do I trust how well they would protect my information. I think all that just makes it that much easier for criminals to get the same information.
But mostly, I just feel saddened that so many resources are being used to try to separate me from $10 here or $100 there to funnel into corporate profits, rather than being used to better educate children, or help with medical research. Thin
It isn't the companies we are worried about (Score:2)
It is the thieves. Lackadaisical security + credit card number on file = massive fraud.
I worked for a company whose billing department kept an .XLS with their customers SSN and billing information on a public share drive. The billing people just didn't care. But it wasn't the billing department that was going to commit the fraud - it was some other random untraceable person who stumbles onto the share drive.
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the point being that such security is impossible to enforce across the board, so the only answer is to prevent companies from collecting it in the first place. they may keep it for the duration of a sale/service rendering until receipt of payment.. after that they must delete.. something like that.
He's a columnist ... (Score:1)
So, someone who has chosen to spend their career in the public view, often expressing personal opinions and anecdotes in what they hope will be a widely read press doesn't have a problem with people knowing a lot about him. Big shock!
There are those of us out there, however, who don't feel the need to broadcast our navel gazing (at least with our names attached to it) - perhaps we might have a different opinion on how happy one should be with this amount of private information being known...
Intelligently Directed Advertising (Score:1)
Using dataminters to your advantage... (Score:1)
Okay, unusual situation. I'm transgendered. While my legal name change wont be in effect till next month I have used facebook and other sites like that to create a history for my new name rather then having it look like i was suddenly someone else. They want data, i feed them crap. Hope they are happy.
Aren't we tired of these antiprivacy "news"? (Score:2)
Isn't this the same issue raised here http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/09/1332202/Ask-Slashdot-Privacy-Paranoiaare [slashdot.org] we going to start dismissing the value of privacy twice a week now?
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The same thing that is basically wrong with most people. If it doesn't affect adversely in the pocketbook they tend not to get so worked up about it. The whole freedom-of-speech/human-rights spectrum is way less important to most people than the am-I-comfortable factor.
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They probably won't use their compiled profiles for things like blackmail, but you can bet your ass that this information is being sold to other companies, especially those the person does business with: banks, retail stores, probably even spammers, and maybe the government.
Data Miners wouldn't do it if there wasn't some way to profit from it. Joel Stein has struck a major blow to personal privacy, and passively helped usher in the insidious and pervasive personal data overuse that Philip K Dick imagined i
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> Joel Stein has struck a major blow to personal privacy, and passively helped usher in the insidious and pervasive personal data overuse that Philip K Dick imagined in Minority Report.
Hyperbole much?
But does this mean I'm going to get awesome computer displays that give me an upper body workout while I browse for porn^H^H^H^Hnews and can buy cool little spider-bots with built-in tasers to chase the neighbors' kids with?
-1 to CNN for those crappy links (Score:1)
at the end of each paragraph.
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oops... TIME and CNN, not just CNN