aeroue wrote:Scary thing is as im sure Sandy is aware, someone probably does know where all those 15000 people live, each one, so long as they use their home pc, has an individual IP adress which can be followed to your home. If you have the home you have who lives there and from there on far more information can be gathered. Like job etc.
8O
Absolutely right, aeroue. And that's one of the wisest posts I've seen in a long time. The situation actually is that bad. In some ways, it's worse. For instance, there is a company named ChoicePoint in Atlanta. There are several companies of this type in the U.S. They comb the records looking for individuals, addresses, phone numbers. A telephone book would be an easy place to start. Disk space is so cheap now that there's no longer a need to erase...as there was even five years ago.
ChoicePoint then gets charge information from Visa and MasterCard and various large chains with their own credit cards. It has access to hospital and insurance records. None of these companies admit to selling info to ChoicePoint and similar companies, but the information is passed--and I don't believe it's done in every case for free. (It's widely said that much of the spam deluge was caused by AOL. When it was in deep financial trouble several years ago, AOL reportedly sold the information about its
own subscribers to raise cash.)
What does ChoicePoint do with this information? It combines it, places it under the proper name and/or Social Security Number/ID Number--and then sells it to many of the companies that provided their own piece of the puzzle in the first place. Even the government buys information from ChoicePoint and others, or so the newspapers say. I forgot the discount cards at the large grocery chains. You get 20 cents off a six-pack of Coke, and the record of everything you bought goes into the corporation's computer. They sell it to ChoicePoint and others.
In the end, what happens? Your health insurance company knows that you eat food that's high in cholesterol, and they raise your insurance rate. Your homeowner's insurance company knows that you buy a 1.75-liter bottle of vodka each week, conclude that you drink too much, and might start a fire. They cancel your policy. I was in line in the drug store recently when a pregnant woman started to buy a carton of cigarettes with her MasterCard. I interrupted her chat with the checkout person and urged her to pay cash for the cigarettes. Why, she asked. Because, I said, that information will go from MasterCard to your health insurance company and possibly to your obstetrician; then if your obstetrician makes a mistake later, and you sue him, his lawyer will make a big deal in front of the jury about your smoking while pregnant. She was then very happy to pay cash.
If this comes as news to some readers, then you don't read a good metropolitan newspaper every day. All the details about ChoicePoint came out when it "lost" the names and Social Security numbers of several hundred thousand people. California is the only state with a law that requires companies to notify people when such info is compromised. ChoicePoint had no option but to notify everyone who had been compromised: who would believe that only Californians had a problem? That was when the details on these info gatherers came out in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. The US Government has
no law requiring a company to notify individuals of lost/stolen ID information.
This selling of information has been going on for some time. It's just that, as everything becomes more computerized, more information is recorded and stored. The columnist William Safire commented on the trend several years ago. He said that the only anonymity comes through paying cash.
Along these same lines, there is a law pending approval in Ottawa right now. If passed, it will require ISPs to save surfing details, email addressees, even contents of some communications, on every customer of the ISP for at least three months...just in case the police want to look at the info, without a judge-issued warrant. Nice, eh?
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled several years ago that nobody is entitled to privacy on a cell phone call (at either end of the conversation) because, along the way, the conversation is broadcast through the open air like a radio station. The only phone calls that still require a warrant-authorized tap are landline to landline calls.
Aeroue, you're right. It's even worse than most people think.
I'll end this post with an example that all the youngest members of this site should be aware of. It's been on the network news programs. The US military now has authorization to make and maintain a database containing the names, identifiers, addresses, phone numbers, ages, and
grade point averages of all high school and college students in the country...in order to make recruiting for the military easier. I saw an interview with a sergeant whose job is recruitment. Things are a little difficult at the moment (I wonder why?), and the sergeant says he uses the list to call high school seniors at home and suggest they sign up for the army. He said he usually calls around supper time when people are likely to be at home.
I bet many of our colleagues here on the site thought that their
own GPAs were their
own business.
Big Bubba has different ideas.