Marketing

These dirty pimps have been trying to sell us garbage we don't want for many many decades. People have evolved and will continue to thwart the salesmans lame plans.

If someone gives you the firm handshake and uses your first name in every sentence: He's read that awful 1950s book and is trying to sell you something, scrape the fool off.

My father told me when I were a nipper: When reading a magazine check out who the advertisers are before reading the section on top 10 toasters, there's usually quite the correlation.

Your grandpaw could tell you never believe what you read in the papers and read between the lines.

Nowadays all you have to do is control the data being gathered. Why tell these imbeciles the truth? If some clown asks you what way you voted when leaving a polling booth tell him a pack of lies. When the people at xyz corporation ask you what your household income is, tell them it's under $5,000 per annum. GIGO.

Consumers of the world rise up, you have nothing to lose but your coupons.

Toasters

Ha, I bet even in that (hopefully) far-off idyllic age the Pundits witter on about that toasters will still either send slices of warmed bread flying across the kitchen to the everlasting joy of the cat, or produce an end-of-cycle so lacklustre you need a knife and a willingness to risk second-degrees burns to lever the fodder out of its cavernous maw.

One can only hope that in the future beating a salesman to death with your cybernetic toaster will be legally recognised as justifiable homicide.

PS Would you two please stop smooching? The Google ads for this page are currently all trying to sell Asian or Russian brides, or something called Cowboy dating.

The beginnings of a revolution

The one thing people - even those who want to protect their privacy - never seem to think of is a campaign for legislation that makes their personal data (i.e. data about themselves) their own property.

Trademark your own face; copyright your own name; assert your moral rights to be identified as the author of your own bank statement. And so on and on. And then sue any f*cker who scrapes your data and sells it to the highest marketer.

About those ads

But first: @Seán

In a total information/surveillance society lies will be tossed out as anomalies by software designed to ferret out the truth based on information from combined databases. To defeat this the lying would have to be so all encompassing that the lie would become your life and then they know you don't they?

You can run but you can't hide.

Well that's just too depressing so about those ads. I want to see if anything happens if I repeat a word unrelated to the post...

butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly

If there is anything related when I next visit this page this could be a fun game.

butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly

Pah!

Made no difference at all. If 'Ads by Google' responds at all it is to a very limited range of sex related words - and reveals a very limited experience.

Pah! No fun at all.

Tehehehe

@first commenter+response... that was hilarious... made my morning...

As for the rest I use tor and privoxy to protect who I am online. I only provide limited info about myself online and ofter use misinformation all over the place.

Just

fnord

To paraphrase Heinlein

It is your duty to buck the system at every turn - if you can't get away with paying less tax, pay a little more - it messes with their system, and causes headaches. Give false, or as little information to governments, corporations and other bodies. Make it as difficult to profile you, and in turn profile the world, as you can.

Bucking the system

The thing is, if you work really hard to buck the system - data cleansing; anonymising; polluting social profiles with lies, etc ... it is just one of the squillions of records that has been affected. The data miners don't care about you, they care about the population. The only person who has been affected is you.

It is fortunate that the people who have the data and the competence are motivated by greed, so their only desire for this information and profiling is to make money out of it and us. The scary people who might want to subjugate us a) are clutzes and b) can't afford the clever people who can use this data.

Assumptions

@Dunstan Vavasour

"The scary people who might want to subjugate us a) are clutzes and b) can't afford the clever people who can use this data."

Re: b) How do you know? The 'scary' people could (are probably) already hiding certain areas of spending. For all we know they might even have started some of these data mining companies - thus self-financing. At the very least they would have people employed by these companies - perhaps up to the level of director. If not then I would assume they could entice, encourage, or persuade these companies to cooperate and assist for the 'good of the nation' if some employees/owners/management were not already so inclined.

Re: a) Never ever underestimate the capabilities of those you might oppose and always remember that stupidity, while it may sometimes be true, is a very useful disarming pose. Also remember that with regard to clandestine behaviour you are only going to hear about some of the mistakes. With no comparable revelations re ongoing successes you don't have enough information to accurately judge capability.

@AC - Tipping the scales

"It's not exactly reassuring but I don't think that, in this case, the worst that can happen will happen."

I agree. I think that to some extent we can count on the messiness of democracy and the pendulum swing of ideological fashion it permits to (over time) moderate the direction of travel and effects of any trend.

Well, I'm not really a texan...

"Your car might use sensors to communicate with a nearby vehicle and discover that the driver of that car often breaks at the last minute."

And I have noticed that. The pieces keep getting in my way.

--Glenn

P.S. You other guys; that was not an accidental error on their part. The toaster did it while being cheerful in the morning to the person falsely accused of writing the article.

8]

Sod the toast!

I gave up on this one when the vision of the ideal car turned out to be the bastard offspring of a Porsche Speedster and a BMW Z3 as apparently imagined by a blind, Albanian peasant cloned from the moustache of Salvador Dali.

Is this stuff Bollocks 2.0?

Butterfly won't work.

No-one aggressively sells butterflies or lepidopterist kit.

Let's try something with guaranteed banal marketing:

house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies house Insurance policies car Insurance policies

and ducks.

Mine's the one with the large cover

'Breaks'

"and discover that the driver of that car often breaks at the last minute"

Do you mean some kind of nervous breakdown or something? Or do you mean 'brakes'?

@A marketing luddite

"I mean, it's hardly the ultimate lifestyle accessory, is it?"

Well, yeah it is. Dump your old one and get a new smart one as soon as you can.

(pssst. my toaster told me to say that or it would start making false reports about me. help me, someone, pleeeease)

You all missed the point.

What OS will be the taster running? Is the XBox a first disguised attempt at selling "intelligent" toasters? Will it be possible for a blackhat to trick the kit into serving you burnt toasts?

Forget the privacy, we need serious answers!

@A J Stiles

After years of badly cooked works breakfasts and all this low-cal, low-fat rubbish, that sounds almost orgasmically nice. The long drawn out tease, the careful thought that's gone into the timing, the.... hmm, I'll stop there....

This is what the world needs, advertisers! People taking a little more time and care over what they do! Give us a time-slower-downer. That's not an illegal smokable...

Big Google? Not likely

Ashlee I really enjoyed your article. I have serious concerns with data privacy but I don't fear Google collecting my buying habits. Mixing private and public use of behavioral data into the one category is a mistake.

Private use of data (google, amazon et al) is benign or laughable at worst and beneficial at best. It saves me time rummaging around for what I want to buy when I log into my amazon account (although it bums me to be reminded that I am in fact a stereotype).

The real danger is government use of this data. They're the ones with the coercive power to do nasty things with the data. All a company can do is beg me to buy something it sells. Only when the companies give their data over to the government does it become a real threat to our lives. Or of course when they lose a laptop with my bank details on it.

@OC there is substantial law breaking infact

"FUD

By Anonymous CowardPosted Tuesday 20th May 2008 00:48 GMT Move along, nothing substantial here."

your wrong OC, there is substantial law breaking infact.

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15980

for the PDF version

http://www.paladine.org.uk/phorm_paper.pdf