On 10/17/2015 01:55 PM, Mayayana wrote:
| With near-total surveillance
| between business and gov't we're getting into unknown
| territory. We're inadvertently redefining human rights.
|
| Sure! And, besides grumbling, wat do you suggest folks do about
| this? And, what portion of their lifestyle should they sacrifice
| to take on this effort??
|

I'm only suggesting making an effort to deal with it,
which you seem to be doing yourself. We can't completely
protect email, but we can avoid free webmail that redefines
our own files as their property.

CVS now sells customer data to drug companies. What
to do about that? I can go to other drug stores. But is
Walgreens any better? I don't know. In any case, I can
keep track of it and vote with both my votes and my wallet.
If most people even just disabled 3rd-party cookies it
would be a crisis for online advertisers.

Partly this is to discourage the practices and partly
it's to help prevent them from getting worse. If people
accept that Google owns their email then Google will own
their email. It doesn't have to be that way.

I once had a Jewish friend whose entire extended
family was lost in WW2. Only his parents got out. I
once asked him why the Jews didn't leave Germany,
despite the restrictions, abuse, forced wearing of
Star of David.... The treatment kept getting worse,
yet most of them just stayed. He said that's a common
question that Jews ask among themselves. I suppose
probably it was just another case of the slow-boiling frog:
The water doesn't seem *too* hot yet, and it's a
lot of hassle to jump out.

I think the Star of David emblems are a pretty good
analogy to current issues. (At the risk of melodrama,
perhaps. One could easily accept them with excuses.
Who cares? What are we going to do? Move to France?
That would be one big headache. And aren't we Jews,
anyway? So what harm is there in wearing these
emblems? But the requirement itself was a humiliation
and a step in the systematic abuse of the citizenry.

I wonder how people have even allowed things to
go as far as they have, with email being spied on
while geographic location and activities are tracked.

There's very little privacy protection at present. The
only example I'm aware of is the Video Privacy Protection
Act, which resulted from Robert Bork's video rental history
being leaked to the press.

I know that librarians typically won't tell you who has a particular
book out, but whether that's because of a legal restriction or simply
because of the librarians' code of ethics I don't know.

Perce