05.04.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:17 pm by DMZ
Companies should notify a customer who they intend to send personal information to. For instance, when you complete a transaction with an online travel company, when you submit payment (or at the terms and conditions page, or wherever in the payment path) they should clearly state:
Your personal information will be shared with
- A global booking engine (your airline ticket)
- The hotel
- The car rental company
As part of the booking process.
0 I understand and agree to having my information shared
0 I do not agree and wish to abandon this
And so on. No company should be able to pass on your personal information without your specific permission. If companies want to sell you out to partners or as part of a mailing list (as Performance Bike did to me), you should be able to opt-out of those, or at least be able to decline the transaction at that point:
Your order information will be shared with
- UPS (shipping)
- Mailomatic Scummasters (junk email)
0 I agree
0 I do not agree
There could be reasonable standards on presentation: readable type, and so on. For real-space transactions, retailers should have to ask your permission specifically for each place they want to pass your info on to.
If you do not specifically consent to information distribution, it would be forbidden (so, for instance, UPS couldn’t sell your information to Mailomatic Scummasters).
Companies that violate this by sending your information where it’s not supposed to go should not only have to pay massive crippling fines, but pay *you*.
This is a case where the interests of the public and of corporations are directly opposed, and the people should win. The use of personal data for profit without disclosure is a deceptive business practice and where government regulation is both justified and beneficial.
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05.03.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:56 pm by DMZ
I’ve always been a weird political bird, in that I’m a rabid environmentalist and equally rabid privacy/free-speech advocate. At the same time, I’m also the kind of guy who has skirted being fired over being vocal and active in oppostition to things my company did (this was in the AT&T Wireless days) that I thought weren’t cool.
I may soon end up doing a lot of work in and around China as part of my job, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
Then my friend Joel, who is smart, made a very short argument:
In Cuba, where we’ve had harsh sanctions in place forever, they are no more free and no more prosperous than they were when we started. In China, while there’s internet filtering and so forth, individuals have a lot more freedom than they did at the same point in time: freedom of individual movement, for instance, is much greater.
Still, it’s a weird feeling to have to face working in an environment where oppression and corruption are as pervasive as gravity.
My other problem is that I have two other, larger conflicting views:
I believe that there’s no reason that someone just like me but born in China should make some small percentage of my salary, and not enjoy the freedom I do. I fear the global leveling that could make all of us equally prosperous, because I have mortgage payments to make, but I also believe that trade can create wealth, and so on.
On the other side, though, I fear that free trade doesn’t get to the people. I may buy a graphics card for my PC that’s made in China, but if that money disappears entirely into the pockets of industrialists and officials who keep working conditions terrible, that doesn’t help anything. If the fabricators are all in cahoots, an industry boom doesn’t help the workers.
Or, to put all of my concerns together: does modern technology and process make it possible to keep the average person in the third world in some early Industrial Revolution serfdom forever? Does it matter what I do at all?
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