On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

That's because we've already privatized the profitable bits of the military in the Defense Industry. There's a phrase I've heard that goes something like "Privatize the profits and socialize the losses". Human life loss is extremely expensive, especially for a private industry, so it doesn't surprise me one bit we haven't privatized that aspect of it.

>Personally, I'm not interested in the standards we pretend to hold the government accountable to. I'm interested in actual outcomes. If privatizing some service can vastly improve outcomes, then great, if government can do it, then great.

I agree with this somewhat, but the reason I mentioned it is because corporate accountability is only effective at keeping leadership accountable to profits not to morals and profits don't care one bit about whats right or wrong. When a company does something wrong most people say "they are a company, only idiots expect them to do the right thing, they did this because it is profitable", at least with a government we haven't given up all hope that that organization can do the right thing because it is the right thing. The fallback on profits serves as an excuse to not even need to pretend to do the right thing that at least the government is held to. Though you are correct that the accountability there varies and is dependent on the population, but I still argue it's better than hoping profits will suddenly start doing the moral thing.

I fly for work a bit and other than the initial sign up for the programs and giving my various reward account numbers to my company travel agent once, there's no cognitive load to me. I don't go out of my way to maximize the goodies, but I've received enough perks here and there that the whopping 10 minutes I've invested into each signup process has more than paid for itself.

The Amish around me were allowed to have electricity, but it could not be inside the house.

So they built a porch, turned it into a greenhouse looking room, and put all their electronics out on it. I have seen a refrigerator, laptop, and even a TV on their porch.

They also had electricity doing some stuff in their barn. I think it was mainly lights but I never went in there, just saw lights on 24/7. They milked the cows by hand (so I was told), plowed the fields with horses (unless they were harassing a local farmer to use their tractor and equipment), and lived like the textbook amish family.

They came from Pennsylvania right before buying the farmland. So I have no idea if they came from a particular sect that allows that, or what. I just know from talking with them (being neighbors and all), they were allowed to have certain stuff, just not allowed to have it in specific places.

I had several amish neighbors like this too. Nice people though except when they assumed they could use your farming equipment without asking and would get extremely defensive if you said no. That was just the fathers though. The wives and children were really great.

There are definitely lots of 'tells' that someone is restricting their visibility, most obviously disabled JS. And I'm acutely aware that those things mark a person as interesting to corporate tracking, in the same way that searching for Tor and Tails flags people for government tracking. But it's hard for me to believe that the tradeoff isn't worth it.

First, because automated surveillance happens in bulk: not standing out from the crowd is no longer proof against observation. (The Panopticon metaphor is if anything behind the times; that only created the fear of constant visibility, not the reality of it.)

Second, because it's not clear to me that corporations take more interest in obfuscated users. Not only do they take more effort and overhead to fingerprint, they're quite likely to be worse business prospects. Using a VPN tells governments you're up to something interesting, but using uBlock tells ad networks that... I hate ads and am unlikely to click on them. In general, I expect that obfuscation signals that someone is a bad target for advertising and provides minimal information about their value as a customer service recipient.

That said, I've been expecting for years now that somebody will get cute and start profiling privacy-aware users for separate targeting. If they've got JS disabled and Firefox up to date and sending DNT, maybe it'd be more profitable to replace tracked JS ads with text-only TripleByte ads or something?