On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 12:48:03 -0700, Kevin Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So what kind of food you prefer, which restaurants and frequency will all be > there for marketing purposes. > Which can also be found out by analyzing my credit card and debit card usage. Nothing new here.
> Frequency of your workouts. Do you do it at home, or away from home. Stuff > like that. > Or they could just watch me walk into the Talisman Centre and know it that way. Again, hardly private information. If someone was really out to get me they'd really be out to get me, tailing me around and all that. I'm just not that paranoid. > Personally, if I was selling you insurance, I'd be interested in that type of > stuff. As they also would be with your eating (and therefore potentially > inferred drinking) habits. This might not be legal/possible now, but that > won't stop it from becoming possible down the road. > A standard argument, applies to genetic profiling and all sorts of other tinfoil hat causes. Do you have a Safeway Club card? An Airmiles card? A store brand credit card like Canadian Tire or the Bay? Then that information's already been collected. Too late. If you don't and you pay cash for absolutely everything and live off the grid, well then I don't believe you because you have an email address so you are so on the grid. :-) > But nobody follows this, nor should they need to if they choose more private > information repositories to start with. > But I do follow this. :-) And yes, they would still need to follow this with their so-called "private" email accounts on, say, Shaw. You would honestly send personal information in an email just because you thought it wasn't going to be stored on a webmail server? It's not about where it's stored, it's about how it gets there. > I bet you can't find out anything about the child I sponsor in Mexico, in > spite of the fact they they've never sent an encrypted email in their life. > That had everything to do with not having information in harvestable places, > and nothing to do with encryption. You're simply choosing to put that > information in much more public places. > But now I do know you sponsor a child in Mexico, because you just mentioned it on a public mailing list, and it's now been archived for the world to see, here: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ (not there at this moment, but since you included the list in the "To" line, I assume it'll show up soon enough) So it's not GMail's fault that information just leaked, it's your own. Again, postcard thing. > The truth is, that this is much like leaving credit card carbon paper laying > around. Generally, it isn't a problem. But the potential certainly is there > for it to turn into a problem, so why on earth would you do it? > With this I couldn't agree more, but it's not just GMail, that's what I'm saying, it's all email. Every email you send leaves a trail. That email from your foster child passed through a mail server or two, each one, even if it didn't store the contents of the email, stored the fact that that email passed from them to you. It all leaves a trail. Think Microsoft and their anti-trust trial. They didn't use Hotmail accounts to talk to each other, but the information was still there. Getting all paranoid about GMail is silly. The whole concept of email has taken us so far down the road of lack of privacy that it's too late to call GMail an invasion of it. Ian _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
