Private Intel Agencies?

[caraig]

Life still sucks. More on that later, maybe. For now, ran into this:

In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data

Information to the highest bidder! Now aren't you glad you sent in all those product registration cards and customer satisfaction surveys?

Pax.

Comments

[buran.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm getting real tired of articles claming There Is Some Magic Difference Between Now And Four Years Ago. As If All Of A Sudden, The Government Decided To Start Being A Spy.

They've been doing it all along, y'know ...

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Between now and four years ago? Not at all. I KNOW that Big Brother has been doing shenannigans like this for quite a while now. The problem is that before it was illegal and they could be called on the carpet for it. It didn't haoppoen often, but the possibility was there. Now, it's being legistlated.

And actually that's above and beyond what bothers me about this article. A private corporation shouldn't be involved in the handling of all this data on citizens who are under suspicion of having committed no crime. Nobody should, in fact. Now, while I know that the 'information genie' is already out of the bottle, I thoroughly disagree with people who say 'suck it up.' There are things that can be done to curb this sort of corporate misbehavior... starting with revoking their charter and destroying all of their assets has a nice ring to it. ^^

[tamahori]

Recently our post-office got caught using the posties for information gathering (the state of people's house's paint-jobs, which they were selling to a local paint company for their advertising scheme) of an admittedly rather mild form, but it still bothered the heck out of people due to the amount of worrying information a postie can pick up about you from seeing your house every day, and knowing who you get letters from.

They have apparently killed the project after people found out about it, and ripped them a new one over it. Thankfully they are still, in part, government owned, and our government knows what it will do to their popularity if they didn't step on this.

Still, it's yet another disturbing trend.


Brett