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Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me per…
There was an instance of someone being arrested because he purchased rope from a Safeway around the time that his wife disappeared. The police were able to obtain the guy's details from his Safeway card and used his purchasing habits to try and make him the prime suspect in the investigation. I think that it turned out that he wasn't guilty of anything either. [ This is all IIRC, btw. My memory could be waaay off, bu…
I'll give you an upvote if you can find the source for that story. I can't find it myself.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an instance of someone being arrested because he purchased rope from a Safeway around the time that his wife disappeared. The police were able to obtain the guy's details from his Safeway card and used his purchasing habits to try and make him the prime suspect in the investigation. I think that it turned out that he wasn't guilty of anything either. [ This is all IIRC, btw. My memory could be waaay off, bu…
I'll give you an upvote if you can find the source for that story. I can't find it myself.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/030223
I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot.
The important part:
a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his
arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases
that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was
used to buy fire starters of the same type used in
the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a
happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in
January 2005 because another person stepped forward
saying he or she set the fire and not Lyons.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll give you an upvote if you can find the source for that story. I can't find it myself.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/030223 I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot. The important part: a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt. For Lyons,…
> the police were willing to use purchasing habits/items as circumstantial evidence to go after the wrong person.
Hopefully it is not a great leap in logic to see that the justice system was what went wrong, not the club card thing.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#45Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back…
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me per…
I wouldn't be worried about the grocery store having access to that data. I would be scared of who they might allow to access it. Ever wonder how collections agencies find out what your address is when you move?
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/030223 I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot. The important part: a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt. For Lyons,…
> the police were willing to use purchasing habits/items as circumstantial evidence to go after the wrong person. Hopefully it is not a great leap in logic to see that the justice system was what went wrong, not the club card thing.
On the cynical side, the system cannot be fixed, so it is better to avoid the 'club card thing' so as not to give ammunition to those who would wield it against you.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#47This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it. Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
Can't someone develop an extension that prevents cookies from being accessed inside iframes (white/blacklist)? Wouldn't that stop the whole problem? Or simply block the facebook iframe urls?
Isn’t this what enabling "block all third-party cookies without exception" in Chrome or disabling "accept third party cookies" in Firefox does?
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#48Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back…
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me per…
>if advertising became more accurately targeted...You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in... there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.
Counter-example: facebook.com. Supposedly that site has a lot of info on their users, yet their "targetted" ads are as useless and cruft filled as ever.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#49What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward. I predict some migration of young…
Or there is a big push for Facebook for create/fix publishing controls? (i.e. 'publish this post to everyone except mom & dad')
I'm thinking they would need to get quite complex - eg. what happens if someone posts to your 'wall' - who controls the visibility of that? Simply moving to a different site might be a more convenient solution for most people. Especially if these 'all-in-one' programs become more popular.
Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
#50Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back…
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me per…
I have a recollection of hearing about a "breakthrough" in the health insurance world when some company figured out that there was a substantial correlation between grocery items purchased and health issues. I'm very weak on the details (I think the context of my learning about this was a presentation of a "brilliant executive" who will now share blah blah blah-- oh, by the way, she figured out how to do this for insurance companies). My google-fu is weak, but here is a link that at least makes my fuzzy recollection a little plausible.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/70072_loyal11.asp
This is a pretty serious outcome IMHO.
Edit: HBR article http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/d/5/7d50c016-6e60-4...