Reply to post: Re: Sorry, I've got to say it...

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

Martin an gof Silver badge

Re: Sorry, I've got to say it...

I just...... don't care.

I live a blameless life. [etc.]

Two things. First, the above is a variation on the if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear argument, which itself is probably a grandparent of first they came for the Jews, and is definitely a variant of give [them] and inch and [they'll] take a mile.

Second, the list of pre-existing ways to profile someone. What you miss is that up until now, these all existed in isolation and they were all subject to quite strict regulations. Yes, the credit card company has a good profile of my purchases, sufficiently good that when something "unusual" crops up they can flag it automatically. What they don't have is a way of tying my purchase of a birthday card and a box of chocolates to a specific individual whose birthday is next week.

Yes, the phone company keeps a log of my calls - more than it used to in the analogue days when a phone bill was calculated by looking at the meter in the rack - but the phone company is not allowed to release that information to any Tom, Dick or Harry who asks for it; in general (though I realise there's been some debate about this in the UK) access is only granted after a certain legal process is undertaken. On top of that, the phone company probably can't connect specific numbers to specific names, unless they are also subscribers to the same company, and it certainly has no record of - nor any need for a record of - my aunty Viv's birthday.

The difference with Facebook and similar companies is that they go out of their way to collect this connective data. They can/will tie a payment to a location, they can/will search the contacts book recursively and find people who have birthdays soon (because daft people put information like this in their profiles), they can/will monitor that person's communications and note when they send a "thankyou" because they absolutely can tie that person's name to a specific number.

And that's why we're worried. That's why I never felt the exchange was worth it.

M.

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