Bad form. Very bad form. And thousands upon thousands of people submit to these contests without realizing what they're doing. And this is why I don't submit. Sorry, the illusory possibility of a Big Prize™ is not enough inducement.

As for the loss of copyright that B. Durbin notes -- I think that if an end-user were to find that Disney or other entity were to try to assume the ownership of the copyright, and the submitter were to protest that they were not properly informed, they might be able to contest it if they could get the ACLU or the EFF involved. Otherwise it's going to be a matter of the multi-conglomerate winning by attreition, because they have the much bigger pocket for legal fees.

IP addresses are "non-personally identifiable" as street addresses: many of them are shared (just like street addresses), and some people change them quite often (just as with street addresses). Nevertheless, if somebody tried telling people that street addresses are non-personally identifiable, and as we should consider them as irrelevant to privacy, I don't think they'd get taken seriously.

[*] I'm not calling out our hostess here: She is right that collecting and retaining IP addresses is a completely normal and routine thing for websites to do. The bullshitters are the people who imply that because IPs do not map 1:1 to humans, they are therefore not personally identifying and therefore without privacy concerns.

And I am regularly met with complete incomprehension. These systems flourish not simply because many people accept the devil's bargain, but because they don't even recognize it as a bargain. The creepy stranger offers them candy and they respond, "Ooooh! Candy!" and get in the car.

I'm mindful of various recent findings about how personally identifying other non-personally-identifying information can be. I'm also aware that if you sifted through who links to me, and you knew my IPA, there would be a single answer to who I might be.

I generally pay for groceries etc. with cash. Why should I make it easy for Big Business to find out about me (particularly with the all-pervasive "Nectar" cards over here which go across any number of businesses so they can really analyse your life habits and household).

The only store card I've got is one for a bookstore - I don't mind them knowing I buy books (even what books - if I was bothered about a particular book purchase being known, I'd buy anonymously).

The current card has a string of 10 random digits and, let us say, Not My Name. The cash register prints one's name on the receipt so the cashier can say, "Thank you Ms./Mr. X."

Let us say that I despair for literacy in this country. ;-)

What does astonish me is how many trolls and fellow travelers DO decide it's worth their while to register just to say something nasty and vapid.

My model is that most of the MSM (and CNN is a good example of this) benefits enormously from being gatekeepers of what information their customers are to be shown. They use that power partly to gain viewers by showing them stuff they want to see, and partly to keep advertisers and confidential sources sweet by *not* showing their audience stuff that would rub the advertisers or sources the wrong way. They have in general been pretty hostile to online sources of information, for pretty understandable reasons--who wants to have their special position in the world taken away by a bunch of upstarts? Who wants to have their ass-kissing of the powerful exposed by a bunch of irresponsible bloggers who call waterboarding torture even when Dick Cheney tells them it's not?

Eventually, it got pulled. The link now redirects to a typical Disney promo page for Wall-E.

But they didn't scrub everything:

Buy n Large Disclaimer

With gems like:

All acquired customer information becomes the property of the Buy n Large corporation and can be used (but is not limited to) any venture the Buy n Large Corporation deems beneficial to it. By visiting Buy n Large (or a Buy n Large partner) the user agrees to relinquish (if requested) any personal assets that may be deemed "usable" by the Buy n Large Corporation; this includes (but is not limited to) real estate, stock holdings, user transportation, employment income and the users "soul" (either real or imagined, regardless of spiritual or religious affiliation).

Grrrr.

A friend of mine was until recently the CTO at a company most people here have never about before, which currently describes itself on its "About" page thusly:

Right now, $REDACTED engages all 220 million U.S. Internet users, providing detailed audience profiles for the advertising marketplace to learn more about what consumers are doing online. We also provide advertisers with a new way to evaluate their individual customer profiles against the entire U.S. Internet population, so they can identify prospective customers numbering in the millions, even tens of millions.

For example, I know a lot about what can be done with IP addresses (just get me going about IPv6 and NAT444 if you want to be really bored), and my blood should ran cold when I found out that companies like the one my friend worked at have relationships with ISP's that allow them to correlate IP address assignments with traffic logs to produce surprisingly detailed audience analyses.

He assured me that their database knows enough about my household that it can tell which member is the one that reads Making Light from behind the one IP address assigned to the house. It knows the salaries and brand preferences of everyone in the house. It knows which one is the science fiction fan and which one loves young adult fantasy. It knows what kind of car we will buy and when we will buy it. It knows where our children will probably be going to school next year. It knows how much we will spend on dinners at restaurants next month. It knows our religious and political views well enough to predict how we're going to vote on proposition 19 in November.

It short, it knows more about us than we do ourselves, and it's getting more and more knowledgeable every day. (I doubt it's getting any wiser, however.)

I'd be interested in knowing what it knows about me, but alas, I can't afford the subscription fee. Maybe if I ran a multi-million dollar website, I could find out.

I didn't return the information card.

Discount card still works perfectly well.

Other stores, I use other people's telephone numbers. For people I like, it's with permission. One only has to find one that works for a given store.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting.

I try to mitigate this as much as possible, i.e. no links, feeds, no twitter, no FB, etc. But there's only so much one can do and have an internet life. I do use countless library, archive, etc. sites. Those are pretty safe.

Love, C.

(Everybody does run with third-party cookies blocked, right? Um, say, where has that option gone in Firefox anyway? There's no "tasks" menu, which is how the docs say to get to this function.)

The other store I got a card for has quit using them, actually.

I like to think that somewhere, someone's profile is being populated with my outliers, and every now and then they get peculiar and inexplicable coupons for root beer and Old Spice.

There are add-ons, but they all refer to the underlying service, which I can't find. (I currently have an add-on installed for it, and that may be hiding the underlying service, too. But I looked first.)

I instead shop when I can at markets that don't require them for discounts, or for only a few of the discounts they offer.

Which is why, at the biggest social gathering you go to each week, everybody should put their discount cards in a pile and then draw one at random.

I have an Oyster card for London transport, because they've made cash-tickets prohibitive relative to Oyster for many journeys. I paid for it with cash (despite the offer of a free one sent to your address - uh huh), and top it up with cash; they may know that particular card mainly does X journey, but they can't link it to any particular individual.

It appears to have been comprehensively archived by the Wayback Machine. Much fun...

My grocery store card was filled out as "John Doe", address "General Delivery" in my town, phone +1-650-555-1212. If you don't have the card with you, you can use your phone number, which seems to belong to a "Mr. Lee". Back when there was a Cypherpunks group, we used to occasionally all trade cards, but this is private enough.

Most people who have my zip code online have 90210, which was trouble-free until Apple started occasionally emailing me about in-store specials at their Beverly Hills store instead of my own.

For most of the websites that haven't been borganised into Facebook, all that the checkboxes really mean is that unless you find the right combination of them, they're going to send you occasional spam which is usually ok, and that they'll sell your info to third parties which is not. I do keep enough free email addresses around that that's usually ok, but I certainly don't want YouTube/Google sharing information, nor Flickr/Yahoo, nor Facebook/anything - especially since the reason I got onto Facebook was to keep track of my actual relatives. I didn't mind having real relatives on MySpace, because I didn't use it that much, and the relatives were just the heavy metal band my nephews were in, so there wasn't much risk of leakage except about my alleged musical taste (they weren't great composers, but they're actually both pretty good players.)

The point isn't that the purchasing information is or is not attached to my real identity, the point is that they're getting a complex set of correlated consumer activity, and they're getting me to collect it for them at the price of a purchase discount. If a company wants to pay me a salary to collect market information for them, that's one thing. But that's not how they're advertising the transaction.

I wanted to make it harder for dumb machines to find it. I don't think my friend told me anything that isn't in their marketing materials, but I'm also not trying to create any particular snowball against that company by naming it. It's just one of several companies that do that sort of thing. They're all abominations against nature, if you ask me.

Furthermore, you don't just have to throw away the information, you have to throw away all backups that contain it at the same time; or else it's not really gone.

And this is nearly impossible, unless your backup scheme is structured in ways very unlike the normal to make it possible (grouped on physical media by expiration date).

For reasonable information retention rules, fields in the same row of a database table might have different lifetimes! (Well, it's perhaps unlikely the implementation would end up that way once the information retention rules were taken into account.)

Google would forceably airlift all opt-out users of the internet to a remote internet-less, electricity-less, lightless, and oxygen-less enclosure on a remote island, IIRC.
(The Web Means the End of Remembering.)

I hate rebate cards with a red-hot passion. I rarely get any benefit from them, and they're a pain in the ass, and I feel bad about not spending the energy to get the benefit out of them. I'll avoid a store because they push rebate cards at me.

I sign up for discount cards at favorite stores, have a Facebook account (with most of the privacy controls turned on, especially the 'can we share your info with 3rd parties?' one), and use common sense when it comes to clicking on online advertisements. Internet use is so prevalent now that it's impossible to keep your personal data hidden from companies and providers, unless you hide behind multiple pseudonyms.

In terms of my own information, I try to make it hard for people to ask questions about me that they don't want to know the answer to. If someone wants to know my sexual orientation, or my religious or political beliefs, they can find them, but they have to go looking, and if they make any decisions based on that information then I in turn get to base my response off the fact that they went looking. Generally speaking I'm in a position to say "fuck you" and associate elsewhere if someone takes a piece of information the wrong way -- a benefit of white male privilege, among other things -- so I'm not in too much danger there. I hope that my not hiding my weirdnesses helps build a world where more people can choose to not hide their weirdnesses if they so desire.

Which was really peachy a couple of years ago, when while out of work and one of my life partners, who had had a breast biopsy for cancer a few days earlier, woke up to find herself in a pool of blood from a blood clot and infection from the surgery.

It did really help that the hospital had all our information in hand, but we also brought the folder that had all our paperwork in case anyone gave my any grief.

(y'all don't want to know what happens if a family member gets treated badly by medical staff and i'm there..... it is ugly and usually involves profanity; If someone I love is under medical care and gets treated with diffidence, woe betide the doctors and nurses!)

For an extremely recent finding with interest to the Netherlands contingent of Making Light, check out Koot, van 't Noordende, and de Laadt's "A Study on the Reidentifiability of Dutch Citizens." From the abstract: "We found that 67.0% of the sampled population is unambiguously identifiable by date of birth and four-digit postal code alone, and that 99.4% is unambiguously identifiable if date of birth, full postal code and gender are known."

This reproduces Dr. Latanya Sweeny's earlier and better known results about US citizens.

Death to the oligarchs who lie to start their wars
Death to the lying weasel doctored datastores
Death to the smarmy slime denying climate change
Death to the third party fuzing data spreading ways.

Death to the product sales of data so released
Death to abusive practice spreading spam and meme
Death to the blockers of self-determined fate
Death to the datamining slavers of today.

We would be broker than we are without our grocery card. The price break on a lot of semistaples (fruit, veg, chocolate, soda) is up to 50%. And for the first half of the year, 30 cents a gallon on gas.

It's a devil's bargain, but especially in the current economy the devil has the whip hand.

I'll admit a discount card would be harder to resist that the loyalty (rebate) cards we get offered over here (UK). I make good use of the fact that we live 5 minutes walk from a big supermarket and I know what time they put things on final reduction (down to as low as 20% of original price). I think I save more than £500 a year on our grocery bill. I mostly buy stuff (veg, fruit etc.) we'd be buying anyway full price, plus a few treats (pack of two or three Gu chocolate puds for 50p - what's not to like?!).

Data collection and data mining and data analysis... when I was doing market research, the data I collected in raw form did not go outside the organizations I was doing the studies for. The reports generated did, but name of respondents, etc., did not get released, nor did anything but quotes, which did not have names of people or companies attached ("a respondent in the auto industry involved in vehicle electronics design..." was about as specific as it got, and "75.4 percent of the respondents wanted...." --the reality was that the .4 was there to make the figure more authoritative looking, the error margins were a lot more than 0.1 percent....

The current regimen, thinking about it, has an error level built-in that's qualitative that gets overlooked--people tend to buy what's available that they know about, and is convenient, and wht they can afford or get credit/loans to purchase. There may be "better" products, but if they don't know about them, can't get them, don't have accurate information (iPhones get lot of sales because they're in the public eye and get direct and indirect promotion in all sorts of ways...), can't conveniently get them, etc. etc. etc., they won't buy.... and the tools for analysis in the form of CLUEFUL surveys, tend to massively stink.... "Which is the one reason..." questions are some of the biggest crocks of crap going, because they can TOTALLY miss key points regarding what people bought/buy and why....

"I bought that miserable piece of shit because I needed something then immediately that I could afford and walk out the door with and couldn't get what I would have WANTED -immediately-!" is not an answer usually available on surveys, for example. "I bought this because at the time it had the five of the ten features I most wanted and I could get it within two weeks and it wasnt from a company I refuse to buy things from" also isn't an answer most surveys allow.... or "it was pink, and I wanted pink!"

So, there is all that datamining, and it may have some really bad assumptions--and NOT allow corretion.... I sometimes take vicious glees responding to e.g. "Why don't you like this?" on Facebook....

Again, when I was doing market research, the people who gave me the best input, were people who wanted things that they either couldn't get, or wanted to have it be known, "I want suppliers to provide these capabilities at that price and with his sort of support...." they wanted someone to listen to them because they had a strong interest in having their input paid attention to. Sometimes there were people who wanted to provide input saying "there are these things I'm using and I really like them and I like dealing with the company that makes them."

Issue with promiscuous, mindless, STUPID, etc., data acquisiting and data mining and data analysis, include institutionalization of bad assumptions that never even get the slightest bit of vetting, lack of rigor in considering what the parameters of interest really ought to be, granularity issues, and often all sorts of systematic biases and blindnesses and inapppropriate preconceptions....

--Dave, experimentally

Same with the big membership club stores. If you've got the room to store a cubic yard of toilet paper, for example, buying in bulk those items you're going to use anyway (and won't spoil before then) will definitely save you money.

See for example, this Wall Street Journal article, in which their reporter went on 5 comparison shopping trips, and every time ended up spending less in the card-less store.

While many of the large supermarket chains now withhold discounts unless you use a snooper-card, a number of smaller chains and independent markets don't. (And some local franchises of big chains will scan their own card for you if you ask.) Among larger chains, Trader Joe's has always given the same price for everyone; and Target is also offering more groceries in many locations, without requiring cards for discounts. (I believe the same is true of Wal-Mart.)

Boy, that's bad naming; it never occurred to me to look there, because what I was after had nothing to do with what "history" means to me in a browser.

Plus of course a dropdown completely altering the rest of the box is pretty unusual.

Thanks!

Then one of the chains opened a string of its own gas stations offering a significant discount with the loyalty card. That pretty much settled the issue. I don't particularly like how much information they're accruing about me, but with the amount of driving I do, it has real value for me.

I now have two drugstore loyalty cards, but the coupons are usually pretty useless. I decide where to go based on which store is more likely to have what I want to buy, not on the cards.

Here in Austin CM seem to have given the coupons up, and it was just coincidence that it seemed to happen shortly before we moved, or else a: my no-longer-so-new new address got lost in the shuffle or b: they don't send coupons to anyone living east of I-35.

And as Teresa then remarks,
This is the relatively innocuous early section of the policy. Later on, the range of things that can happen to your data gets much more alarming and expansive.

Holy heck, I find the implications of that one statement quite alarming enough.

Legal protections, of course, would be nicer.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

I was just about to pass along the same link.

That's a whole lot of information for a $10 giftcard, and instead of leaving me feeling pleased to have had a gift, it's left me with a bad taste.