Feds' Porn Ultimatum

NY Post ^ | August 19, 2007 | By JANON FISHER

[County Agent Hank Kimball]

“Now this statement I don’t understand at all. This isn’t a hypothetical. Where I live almost 100% of groceries will sell at market price only with their ID card, making it kind of de facto obligatory, and I’ve seen no consequences to them so far.”

And I propose the reason there have been no consequences is quite simply that most people take no offense. If a large percentage did, they would stop it.

Your perspective seems to me to be a bit elitist. Obviously most people just don’t care all that much about this, and you clearly think they should. Are they all uninformed rubes? Or do they just accept this sort of information gathering as one of those things where you take the good with the bad.

I, for example, like getting those coupons at the checkout targeted to my purchasing habits.

[Still Thinking]

Obviously most people just don’t care all that much about this, and you clearly think they should.

Yup.

Are they all uninformed rubes?

From what I've seen.

Or do they just accept this sort of information gathering as one of those things where you take the good with the bad.

Also true.

I, for example, like getting those coupons at the checkout targeted to my purchasing habits.

But they can do that, albeit with somewhat less precision, without invading your privacy by building a database of past purchases that might someday be used in a way you didn't like. Many of those type systems just spit out targeted coupons from a special printer at the checkout triggered by what you've purchased. Obviously they can easily do that without ID'ing you or keeping a tagged record of the purchase.

This is just a fairly innocuous case that I'm using to demonstrate the principle. Information gathered about you and under the control of someone else can only hurt you. If you had sole control of the information and it's release would serve your interests, you'd simply release it. Therefore, almost the only time someone else's possession of stored information about you will make a difference is by definition when the difference is one you won't like. In this particular case, I just want to be able to buy groceries at the same price everyone else does without having to "register" my purchases. It's none of their damn business, stores existed for millenia without the ability to trace every purchaser. Just because the personal information of the other 99,999 people who live in my town has no value and can be given away for free, I still need a place to buy groceries. Course, now that Albertson's has done away with this I have that (and they get my business), so I'm going to have to get a little less strident about this.

BTW, most stores will accept a phone number if you've linked one to your card, so all you have to do to spoof this is give them another number and make sure you pay in cash.