If It’s About You, You’re Entitled to Know It
A proposal for a new privacy model.
I’ve accepted that the laws have not kept up with technology. Technology is the Road Runner, and the government is the Coyote with cement shoes.
Our privacy rights in the Internet age are dictated by long diatribes of legalese tied to the buttons we push on our devices labeled ‘Accept.’ The terms are ‘take it or leave it.’
Those grocery and retail cards which are sometimes mandatory to get that hamburger at the sale price and that suit on credit are in on it. Every credit card you use is as well. And your utility companies and local government, especially law enforcement.
We’ve all become the ‘product’ to a bevy of billion-dollar companies specializing in selling that product. They buy data, aggregate it, do some very egg-headed analytics, then sell it to companies for whatever purpose they might use it.
One company, name redacted for fear of a lawsuit, sells 1,500 data points on over seven hundred million consumers. Walmart and Target et al, roll their own and sell it to analytics companies.
Everyone is doing it; it would appear. Japan sells a smart carpet that can record your particular path through a store. It lets retailers arrange the merch to the most significant advantage. The Internet of Things…
