Reading a blog on Acxiom Corporation making billion dollar of sales having over 1,500 data points on half a billion people makes me think what future does a privacy free internet hold for us. On one side we want to see internet to be freed from government regulation, on the other hand we as a community doing a very little on protecting individual privacy.
I have always been annoyed receiving tele-marketing calls at all odd times of the day for the things I am rarely interested in. There is also a great deal of emails (used to be called junk) gets delivered in my mail box instead of junk box, which are somewhat targeted and related to something I might be interested in. I have spent a lot of time in earlier my life doing mail server administration. Seeing these emails makes me think that how far we have come after we started fighting SPAM. Now first they want to know everything about you.
I am no high valued customer but I always get this feeling that people targeting me has a fair deal of idea on who I am, what I do, what I am looking for. I understand sharing and publishing my information online/offline has made me a part of many marketing database. In these case I would like to refer to this known quote “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” but then the question is how many times they would sell my information complete or incomplete, right or wrong to how many people? Is there a limit on how many time can I be targeted of my information can be sold?
I know many countries has a national DND data base, if you register you and still receive unwanted call you can take some action against them, but I don’t know of any authority which can protect me against my information being traded in an open/private market.
I surely would like to see a community to guideline for such activity where user rights more importantly human rights to comes first
Read more on what you can do to protect yourself from being targeted by random information collectors
Do not track IE, firefox, chrome? Who is on your side?
Who is tracking you online? The BIG Brothers? So many of them?
Inspired by
You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome
“Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.”
The Faceless Organization That Knows Everything About You
“We all know such organizations exist, of course, by Acxiom operates on a terrifying scale. The Times reports that Acxiom’s servers process more than 50 trillion data transactions a year. Its database, apparently, contains information about 500 million consumer worldwide—including the majority of US adults— and on average holds 1,500 data points for each of them.”
Tag: Privacy, data, security, information, internet, Acxiom Corporation, protection, tele marketing, spam
Technology Tab 
I’ve thought of this often, but it seems to me that it’s too late for we as individual consumers–even banded together, actually–to do anything about it. For me, it’s kind of like voting…doesn’t really do much good. We only think we the people are picking the winners who run the country. Hah! I just try to stay to myself and just post a crazy rant about it once in a while. Otherwise, my normal dysthymia would once again turn into a big black depression.
I know. they are too big, the resistance should be there, awareness should be there, we should know our rights, we should know what we should do or not do to avoid them.
Thanks for reading my blog and the follow 🙂
The mind boggles at the size and scope of this trade in personal details, so much for personal liberties, they are neither respected nor are they guaranteed. Problem as I see it is that people want the government to do more yet it is the government which for moset of the time the problem. Its not just corporations who sell on your personal details, public institutions do this also. Whether it is your labour or your personal details all you are to the govt & corps is a cash cow to be milked. Liberties, your freedoms, your rights they have no meaning to those in positions of power, wealth & authority, if they were then we wouldn’t be having these problems because they simply would not exist & we wouldn’t be talking about it. I think awareness is there steadily growing and resistance is growing through that awareness, and we have the internet to thank for that. Its why on another level governments the world over are now seeking ways of shutting down the exchange of free speech & ideas on the web. Anyway great post Saad and thank’s for sharing 🙂
As a species, we are learning how to adopt technology in our life. So far we learned how to deal with the existing social structure. Being aware of how technology and how it can effect our social life and cyber life is probably the key here. Once we all know what happens in this “information training business” and the consequences, we should probably figure out what we want or not what. Hopefully that should not happen when it is too late for the generation.
thanks strategos1971 for dropping by and your comment
cheers,
Saad