Secure And/Or Private Online Shopping
from the Who-can-it-be-knocking-at-my-door? dept
Security is one thing. Is privacy another? Let's say we perfect Mitnick's DNA database plan so that everyone can be uniquely identified by some pseudo-random social security number and their DNA code. Everything's secure, and people should be free to buy whatever they want online, right? Nope, we'd like to be anonymous, too. Can we really have it both ways? All so that we can shop in secret....
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Whass up!
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Re: Whass up!
Why don't you think it's likely that abuses of privacy will happen? What's to stop it? Do you believe in privacy-by-obsurity? ie. No one in their right mind would ever want to keep track of X billion transactions, so no one has to worry? I disagree. Check out one of my previous posts on privacy. If you let people collect databases, they will use them. And you have no idea what for. Now if there were a way to flood the database with garbage info that would make the database useless, then I guess there wouldn't be a problem.
But anyway, I'm not really concerned that companies know what I'm buying, as much as I think privacy is a fundamental freedom issue. I sort of think invasion of privacy is a restriction of freedom. Now I guess you can argue if I'm not doing anything wrong, then I shouldn't have anything to worry about, but I tend to think that keeping a log of all of my activity online is in itself wrong. Call me a lunatic fringe person....
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Re: Whass up!
Put me in the "lunatic fringe" also. If you want to be scared about all this stuff read Database Nation. Yeah, it goes a little overboard at times, but the potential for abuse is pretty scary.
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