On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:27:26 +0100
Samuel Penn <s...@glendale.org.uk> wrote:

Hello Samuel,

>On Friday 13 Sep 2013 14:30:11 Brad Rogers wrote:
>> They always have.  They've never hidden that fact.  That's why, like
>> you, I prefer to avoid them.
>Technically, most ISPs do, even if it's just scanning for SPAM.

They *can*, certainly.  Whether most do, IDK.

>If it's simply deciding what advert to show to you, that's one thing,
>and not something I'd consider an invasion of privacy. YMMV.

Surveying/scanning email for clues as to preferences, etc. is an
invasion of privacy in the same way that somebody opening a letter
addressed to you is an invasion.  Now, I know some consider email like a
postcard, but I don't, mostly because there's a To header and also an
Envelope-To header.   Pedantry perhaps, but that's the way I look at
it.  In any case, in other medium does an advertiser have any way of
piking out your preferences.

>If it's to forward juicy looking conversations to humans so they can
>have a laugh about your private life, that's something completely
>different.

This actually happened to my sister-in-law (SiL).  How do we know?
Because the legal secretary that forwarded it to one of her
colleagues with a snide remark, stupidly (accidentally) Cc'd my SiL.
Lots of egg on face, some big apologies, and a *huge* reduction in the
bill.  Whether that person kept their job, IDK.  We're not likely to
find out since that firm is longer used by aforesaid SiL.

>It's perfectly possible for 'Google' to do something that 'Google'
>hadn't meant to do (whether it was accidental or not, I have no
>idea, but it *is* possible for it to have been).

Many things are possible to do accidentally.  However, fitting wifi
capable detector kit to the company camera cars, looking for wifi
leakage, recording all the data it's possible to slurp from any leaks
found, and later decoding said data simply cannot happen accidentally.
Whether it's what the big-wigs intended or not, when things get to that
point, is irrelevant.  It then becomes an act of malfeasance.

-- 
 Regards  _
         / )           "The blindingly obvious is
        / _)rad        never immediately apparent"
But they didn't tell him the first two didn't count
Tin Soldiers - Stiff Little Fingers

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

-- 
Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply via email to