Yep, it is all out there. But do you realize how much information is  
out there? Traffic light data is hardly going to be up there in terms  
of being interesting to government or bad-guys like the Russian Mob.  
We are talking hundreds of thousands of petabytes. That alone is a  
pretty effective protection.  :)

Along with economics. Why would anyone, apart from credit card thieves  
and that ilk, including Wal-Mart I suppose, want to  spend the time or  
money to sift through that information and detail *my* life?

Kind of like securing a message by sending it along, in small pieces,  
over 1000 phone lines. Hiding in plain sight, as it were.

Yes, I know, it isn't right in the first place, but... it is a price  
we pay for being able to go to pretty much any store, pop down a piece  
of plastic, and pay for anything we want. Or to be able to zip down a  
toll highway and pay toll electronically, or indeed, to be able to use  
a mailing list like this. In short, most of the things a great number  
of people want to do require that information about those people be  
immediately available to most of the world. A store pretty much needs  
to know immediately if a credit card is over the limit, for example.

Remember back in the 1970's?  Store took credit cards on faith, no  
electronic verification of a card status! Clerks actually looked  
though a little book with all the bad card numbers in it back then.  
Heck, I did that in 1974 working at K-Mart. Today, that would
be unimaginable. Of course, you had better privacy back then, but you  
could do a lot less.

I wish someone would come up with a way to protect privacy better, but  
even the best encryption algorithms are not un-crackable. And most  
have a government mandated "back door". At least they make wholesale  
encryption cracking by most crooks - costly.



On Dec 24, 2008, at 3:53 AM, John Dunlop wrote:

> I said :
>
> [snip]
>
>> To me it's scary anyway and I don't have anything to hide
>
> Roy Brown asked :
>
>> How much do you earn, John?
> Roy, they already have that information as well as where I shop,  
> what I buy,
> how often, where I live, my financial information including all credit
> cards,, children's details, car details, insurance, dentist, Doctor,  
> email,
> websites in fact....that isn't much about me that isn't on a database
> somwhere or in several soon to be amalgamated databases.
>
> Well, there are a couple of things, but I'm not telling about  
> them...  :o)
>
> Cheers,
>
> John Dunlop
>
> Please note new email address : [log in to unmask]
>
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