Tag ‘em and track ‘em

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Sep 202010
 

OK, this idea of tagging and tracking children like animals in the wild is seriously scary stuff.  According to a post on the ACLU’s blog:

On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags.  RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses.  Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.

Are parents really this paranoid, or is this the school’s solution to attendance problems?  What’s next, cameras in the bathrooms to monitor frequency and type of their little darlings’ bowel movements?  I can just see this in their Potty Log:  ”9/20/10, 8:34 a.m.:  Timmy Richardson had a poo.  Duration of poo:  3.5 minutes.  Poo has been sent to lab for weight, texture, and color information.  Timmy left bathroom at approximately 8:40 a.m., arriving back in classroom at 8:42 a.m. after a short visit to water fountain.”  Don’t think they haven’t considered this level of detail!  Some smothering, nutjob parent out there would probably LOVE to know this kind of stuff.

Also, apparently the school hasn’t read up on how insecure these RFID tags are.  They’re notoriously insecure, this has been well-documented for several years now.  You can find it on this Google thing everyone always talks about.  And look!  It puts the kids’ privacy at risk more than they probably even bothered to think about.

Without real security, RFID chips could actually make preschoolers more vulnerable to tracking, stalking, and kidnapping. Someone who wants to do children harm could potentially sit in a car across the street and scan the children’s jerseys without teachers, school officials, parents, or children ever knowing that any information has been read.  And if this information can be read, it can be copied easily to a duplicate chip.  A child could be taken off campus while the duplicate chip continues to tell RFID readers that the child is safely at school.

This means that little Timmy’s school schedule and daily routine could suddenly become public information for anyone who might find a use for it.  Creepy.

The long-term effect is that this kind of thing trains kids to expect to be tracked and monitored.  They’ll grow up being used to having Someone knowing everything they do and when they do it.  And that sends shivers down my spine.

The American Creepy Survey

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Mar 192010
 

What do you think of this American Community Survey that came with this year’s Census packet…and do you plan to ignore it or send it in with only some of the questions answered?  This thing isn’t a pamphlet, it’s a 30-page book filled with ultra-personal questions that the Census Bureau has no business asking.  (OK, maybe it’s a bit shorter if you’re only doing it for one or two people, but still!)

Here are some examples of the ridiculous questions it’s asking:

  • List wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, or tips from all jobs.
  • List interest, dividends, net rental income, royalty income, or income from estates and trusts.
  • In the past 12 months, what was the cost of oil, coal, kerosene, wood, etc. for this house, apartment, or mobile home?
  • Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?
  • Please print below the specific major(s) of any Bachelor’s Degrees this person has received.
  • Is this person currently covered by any of the following types of health insurance or health coverage plans?
  • Last week, was this person temporarily absent from a job or business?
  • How many weeks did this person work, even for a few hours, including paid vacation, paid sick leave, and military service?

I’m not writing down such personal information and sending it through the mail, it’s fucking absurd.  Also you have to love the name:  American (oohh, that’s me!) Community (hey, I belong to one of those!) Survey (a survey is just a few questions, right?).  It’s bullshit.  Maybe I’ll send just the basic info about the house and who lives in it, but they don’t need to know all that other stuff.

In the UK, everyone’s a potential child molester

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Feb 242010
 

Ah, the mall security guard:  the only thing standing between kids and all the evil paedophiles lurking in the shadows!  So taking photos of your own family makes you a filthy child molester?  Following this fucked-up logic, with all the CCTV cameras they have pointing at the public, can we now accuse the UK government of the same?  Burn the bastards for looking at our precious children!!

According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone. At this point, a Bridges security guard came by and ordered him to stop taking pictures. He said that it was mall policy, and implied that Kevin was taking pictures because he was a paedophile. Kevin told him that this was ridiculous and took his son to find his wife and get out of the mall. He also took a picture of the security guard “so that if I later wanted to make a complaint to the centre I would be able to identify him.”

via www.boingboing.net

Is nowhere safe? (Revisited)

 Marketing Scumbags
Jul 012008
 

A short follow-up to the original post…

According to a post on Wired, back in 2006 British Telecom was secretly infecting its customers’ PCs with spyware which injected targeted advertising into every website they surfed.  That means even mundane things like checking your bank account balance was disrupted by flashing banners for dating services and hot new car deals.  This apparently made life hell for customers in more ways than that:  BT “inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users” which ended up causing flickering screens, slowed connections, and crashed browsers.  All this so that BT could snarf a little more money from the advertising companies?  Motherfuckers.

Oh yeah, and let’s not forget about that new camera system which tracks the eye movements of shoppers. That way they can see what you look at, from the moment you set eyes on that billboard for Disney’s new and improved Mickey Mouse Shaped Cheese Slices (a real product, I might add).  You gotta admit, evil and technology make a great team!

Is nowhere safe?

 Marketing Scumbags
Jun 012008
 

Charter To Begin Tracking Users’ Searches And Inserting Targeted Ads – So this internet ISP (with six million subscribers) decides it’s going to spam its customers’ screens with ads based on where they surf, what they click on, how long they stay on one page vs. the next.  Anyone who doesn’t like this must opt-out online and accept a special browser cookie from Charter.  So every time you clear your cache–which you should do after every browsing session–you’ll need to re-download this stupid cookie to keep from being snooped again.  What else are they going to do with that data besides target advertising at you?  If the government wanted a piece of that to sniff out “terrorists”, everyone’s private surfing habits would be an open book (far more than it already is, anyway).  If I were a Charter subscriber, I’d switch ISPs pronto and tell them why–these scumbags have no business following me around the Web.  One commenter to the post really nailed it:  “Wow, is Charter centered in China?”

Shops track customers via mobile phone - Your mobile phone is about to start working against you and feeding information to the Marketing Douchebags:

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.
The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

Oh, great.  And do you think they’ll warn you before entering the shopping mall that your phone is going to be used to track your every move?  It’s bad enough that malls are designed to make you lose your bearings and keep you in there as long as possible, but this tracking shit, if it becomes widespread, will mean people will have to turn off their phones before entering if they don’t want to be watched.  As if that will ever happen.

Hearing things -OK, this is by far the most disturbing of them all. The Marketing Douchebags have found a way to sonically beam advertisements directly into your brain.  You basically “hear” voices inside your skull, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it or block it out.  It’s very clever, and I’d actually like to experience it sometime just to see what it’s like (must satisfy my geek side), but then I’m done.  I do a lot to remove advertising clutter from my life:  spam filtering, opting out of junk mail/telemarketing lists, blolcking ads and certain cookies on my browser, turning off the radio when the ads start up, avoiding TV commercials, etc.  But when they start placing their shit directly into my mind without my consent, they’ve crossed a very big line.  (Unfortunately the story isn’t accessible at the moment, it says “Server busy”, but I’m hoping it’ll return soon.  It’s fascinating and horrifying.)

Chatting under the influence

 Marketing Scumbags, Unfuckingbelievable!
Sep 242007
 

Are you ready to bend over and let the marketing world jam its fist up your butt just a lil’ bit farther?  Then be the first to sign up with Pudding Media, who offer free phone service if you let them eavesdrop on your phone conversations so they can serve up related advertising on your computer.  Their CEO is apparently very excited about this, because he’s found that they can actually influence what you talk about:

Maislos said that during tests he noticed that the content had a tendency to determine conversations.  “The conversation was actually changing based on what was on the screen.  Our ability to influence the conversation was remarkable.”

Yes, truly remarkable.  It’s not enough that they monitor your phone calls, but they want to influence them as well–maybe steer it towards more interesting topics like your favorite dishwashing liquid or that fabulous Pepsi you had the other day.  So we’ve pretty much accepted that our government snoops on our calls (via AT&T, fuck you very much), and the next logical step is to allow advertising douchebags to snoop as well.

On a side note, I use Gmail daily and love it to death–and it serves up automatic text-based ads based on the contents of my emails.  Some paranoids out there decry this as evil, and Google as evil, blah-blah-blah…it’s the same shit we’ve been hearing since the beginning, and so far these text ads have proved to be harmless. (Other email services do the same thing, but people still bash Google.)  Regardless, by now people should know that nothing is private on the internet and email is no exception–choose your words and topics wisely. The difference with this phone-sniffing business is that these are conversations, not emails.  People talk more freely on the phone than they do via email, the words just spill out and there’s no time to edit or delete before someone hears it. And that’s the way conversations should be.  Nobody should put their private phone conversations up for scrutiny, by machines or people, for a little free phone time.  I hope this new company goes down the toilet fast.

I am in desperate need of some lawn care services.

 Marketing Scumbags, Unfuckingbelievable!
Mar 022007
 

I was paying our gas bill today and was greeting with a “special message” upon logging into our account.  Here are the most relevant bits:

Earlier this year, an investigation by the UTC revealed that PSE violated these state regulations when PSE released the following information for some customers:  name, address, service start date, and product order number.  We released this information for marketing purposes to an outside contractor.  When PSE customers called PSE to initiate or move service, we transferred some customers to this outside contractor, along with their customer information, without their knowledge or consent.  Using this customer data, the outside contractor then marketed products and services (such as newspaper subscriptions or lawn care services) to PSE customers.  This release of customer information began in 2001 and ended March 2006.  Altogether 65,260 customers had information released.  PSE has fully admitted its violation of state law.  We have agreed to pay a civil penalty of $900,000 to the UTC.  We have also agreed to donate the $95,000 we received from the outside contractor to PSE’s Warm Home Fund.  The Warm Home Fund assists low-income customers with paying home heating bills.

Additionally, in order to prevent any future release of private customer information, we have agreed to develop a corporate privacy policy, implement privacy training for all existing and new employees, and report any release of confidential information to the UTC on an annual basis for the next two years.

Christ.  So for a period of six years, Puget Sound Energy handed the contact information for 65,000+ of their customers over to a sleazy marketing company.  And for what?  So they could make a quick buck and let their customers get hassled for shit like newspaper subscriptions and “lawn care services.”  (Now that I think of it, we did have some fliers advertising landscaping companies stuck in our mailbox more than once last year.)  Sure, PSE may have paid a $1 million fine, but what I want to know is:  what are they going to do to make it up to their customers besides post this one-time notice on their website?  I think those customers ought to get something for having their privacy violated like that.  How about a week’s free service?  Or a credit for one?  Doesn’t seem fair that some other entity gets $1 million and the customers get squat.

Oh yeah, and what kind of idiot company doesn’t have a corporate privacy policy?  God!  With all the lawsuits flying around, and all the identity theft and fraud going on, how can a company like this not have a privacy policy in place?  Maybe they’re the only game in town…that’s usually a good reason.

Electronic Arts = Greedy Douchebags

 Geek Streak, Marketing Scumbags
Oct 172006
 

In other evil software news, Electronic Arts has decided to force buyers of its new game to install spyware.  The spyware inside “Battlefield 2142″ watches where you surf (among other things), then reports home so that it can serve up in-game advertising for you to look at.  Aside from the dipshit notion of hawking modern products in a game based in the far future, the very concept of in-game ads is repulsive to most players.  From what I’ve been reading, anyway…personally I wouldn’t buy any game containing that crap.  And if they’re so keen to advertise within the game, why isn’t the game free?  Or super cheap?  But no, you can bet that it will be $50-60.

It looks like videogames, one of the last frontiers free of mindless, distracting, soul-sucking advertising, is about to be conquered by the marketing scumbags after all…

Uncle Sam: sniffing your virtual panties

 Geek Streak, General Blatherings, Idiots & Assholes (Politics)
Jun 222006
 

One more reason to avoid MySpace:  the Pentagon wants to get to know you.  Intimately.  No, more than intimately.  They’re going to create an all-encompassing profile on you by trolling social networking sites for your personal details: daily activities, friends & acquaintances, favorite music/books/movies/hangouts, political views, job information, photographs, videos, etc.  Bascially, whatever personal info you’ve put on your MySpace profile.  Then they’ll combine it with personal phone calls & internet usage info they’ve snarfed from telecom companies and ISPs who bend over and do whatever the NSA tells them.  *cough*AT&T*cough*  This will give the government a perfect picture of who you are:  how you think, what you do in your free time, how you behave, what you believe, and who you associate with.  Of course, a lot of this information is available on peoples’ blogs and personal websites, but the social networking aspect of MySpace (and its cohorts Friendster, Facebook, etc.) makes it oh-so-easy for government goons to get a more complete picture of you, because now they will know what kind of people you hang with, and who those people hang with, ad nauseam.  And considering the amazingly personal things that people are putting on MySpace, well…it’s going to get very interesting.

I’ve always thought MySpace pages were trainwrecks of hideous graphics, assholes hawking products, shitty bands wanting free promotion, creepy pedophiles, spambots, and viral marketing douchebags…which is somewhat of a cynical generalization, but pretty accurate from what I’ve seen.  There are a lot of profiles out there created by people who are using MySpace for its intended purpose, but they tend to be buried under a whole lotta crap.  (Kinda like Blogger.com, come to think of it.)  Nevertheless, ALL my friends have profiles on MySpace now, and for a long time I resisted…I’m already on Friendster and LiveJournal, so what’s the point??  But since MySpace has such a massive membership and might help me stay in touch with friends from high school and other places, I caved and created a bare-bones profile which doesn’t say anything personal but points people to my website instead.  Now I’m thinking about nuking ALL my profiles on social networking sites, save for maybe LiveJournal which I can make readable to friends only.  It’s just getting too creepy.

If the assclown-in-chief wants to know about me, he can be satisfied with my blog, dammit!

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