ZOMG! The cell phone companies are tracking me!
Yeah, and so is everyone else.
I’m gonna keep beating this like a dead horse.
There is no such thing as privacy. There never was.
The bank always knew about your finances, the doctor’s office always knew about your health and your friends and co-workers knew about everything else.
That horse is out of the barn, down the road and in another county.
I thought that the cell phone tracking scene in “The Net” was very well done. And that was, what? 1994? I guess it’s too much to expect the “News” to keep up with what’s been going on for 15 years ….
Heck, how many forms have I filled out using my Social Security Number over the years? Then there’s the Public Records at the Court House, the IRS, the DMV, the School Board, the Board of Elections….
Who needs the CIA when you got Facebook?
“There never was.”
Fair enough, but I think technology enables easier access by more people and across domains – and that makes the lack of privacy occasionally more painful. And now a lot more data is collected.
The advent of the electronically searchable database was the nail in the coffin for the quaint notion of “privacy”, at least for anybody who wanted to participate in modern society.
Question is, where do we go from here? Has anyone else read Brin’s The Transparent Society?
“The document says AT&T keeps for five to seven years a record of who text messages whom — and when, but not the content of the messages. Virgin Mobile only keeps that data for two to three months.
The carriers don’t have recordings of calls, but keep information about calls that are made and received for at least a year.”
Yeah, it’s a little thing we like to call “Billing”. I bet the power, gas, and water company keeps the same info – how much you used and when.
But. But. It was only the evil Apple that did this.
Story made me laugh. Thanks.
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Am I missing your point? Is it that the data is out there, you never had any privacy, so stop worrying about it? It’s perfectly ok for every company to keep unnecessary mountains of data on you indefinitely?
OK or not, data about you accumulates. That data has value to someone and it’s going to be sold and used.
So the only point in accumulating this data is to make it a product with value? Where’s my cut? At this point I should be paid for any change to the existing data and no furthur collection should occur.
Good luck with that.