online shopping

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

sigh, spriggan, I'm glad I can always trust you to bring the argument to new levels of stupidity.

I'm not talking about software tracking. But cookies can and often DO track other web sites you go to. THAT is no one's business buy my own.

The discount cards have no way of tracking use outside that store, and I think they're only marginally better. Stock tracking is also an excellent way of keeping track what you have that is popular, and it does a better job of keeping track of what's returned.

You don't need cookies to track page views. Server logs do that, and they let everyone in. Please stop calling me ignorant when you're talking out of your butt.

The post office isn't what I'm talking about, Mr. Black Pot ignorance. VA State law requires you to register with the DMV. The DMV, not the post office. Which is a FEDERAL organization, not a STATE one. Just like the IRS (which taxes based on the property you own, not where you live, and can deliver to a post office box, and likewise doesn't require a domicile address). And in case you've forgotten how the mail system works, they do it by the address on the envelope. You do not have to register with them to have your mail delivered. Your argument about that is completely insipid. The only part of that that made ANY sense is the voting. And no one needs to know that except at election time. They don't need to know within 4 weeks of any move I make.

[Spriggan]

sigh, spriggan, I'm glad I can always trust you to bring the argument to new levels of stupidity.

Humm, aren't you the person that railed me for useing "stupid" a while back.  Nice to see you have doubble standards.

I'm not talking about software tracking. But cookies can and often DO track other web sites you go to. THAT is no one's business buy my own.

you're right there, but you know what?  That's not what you said in your last post.  You said track whats on your computer.  And also we're talking about the bestbuy cookie, which I looked at, and that dosen't do such a thing.

[/quote]The discount cards have no way of tracking use outside that store, and I think they're only marginally better. Stock tracking is also an excellent way of keeping track what you have that is popular, and it does a better job of keeping track of what's returned.

yes, but again you're changeing your argumenet.  Which a part of is best buy dosen't have the right to check where I'm going on their server.

You don't need cookies to track page views. Server logs do that, and they let everyone in. Please stop calling me ignorant when you're talking out of your butt.

umm...ok.  I'm not trying to be rude, but it looks like you are.  My butt dosen't talk and if it did it would say you're full of it.

The post office isn't what I'm talking about, Mr. Black Pot ignorance.

again?  why with all the hostility?  You're realy not being very mature about this.  Seriously, pull what ever is up you butt out and save us all a lot of trouble.  You're being a real jerk.

VA State law requires you to register with the DMV. The DMV, not the post office. Which is a FEDERAL organization, not a STATE one. Just like the IRS (which taxes based on the property you own, not where you live, and can deliver to a post office box, and likewise doesn't require a domicile address). And in case you've forgotten how the mail system works, they do it by the address on the envelope. You do not have to register with them to have your mail delivered. Your argument about that is completely insipid. The only part of that that made ANY sense is the voting. And no one needs to know that except at election time. They don't need to know within 4 weeks of any move I make.

Eh, so I made one mistake.  Big whoop. And you know what?  The govement has every right to know where you live, deal with it.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

The last parts a matter of opinion, and maybe its the Southernness of Saint and I, but no, the government does not especially need or deserve to know where we live. We pay our taxes and dont commit crimes. Having to tell the DVM where you live every time you move in the same state is just as asinine as having to pay an extra 20 bucks a year to have a sticker for the city or county you live in. Last time I checked Arlington isnt a separate state and my car conforms with both a state safety inspection and an emission standard.

Going back to the discussion at hand, cookies can be stupid in a myriad of ways. Im not a huge fan of the tracking applications of cookies, and they take up a lot of space. An example, we have Windows standard workstation at my coast guard job, and a 24 hour watch where most of those computers are used. Because we have no control over security settings we pick up a lot of cookies, mainly because theres a lot of web "surfing" going on so we can all stay sane. When I say a lot of cookies I mean a lot of cookies, I get my profile "cleaned" every few months of so and regularly have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-150 megs of cookies. Another guy at work recently had to clean his profile at work because IT discovered that he had 2 gigs of cookies. 2 solid years of cookies folks. Granted a lot of that could have been prevented by making the computers security settings higher but our Admirals have determined that high security settings impede doing business.  The main issue is that while you or I know how to handle cookies the bulk of computer users do not, or just dont care. There are still hundreds of thousands if not millions of computer users who still dont know enough about what they are doing to even set their security settings, much less know what cookies are. In addition the benign term cookie, lulls many users into a false sense of security. After all cookies are good,... right?
Give them a name like foreign tracking and facilitation code and people would be far more concerned about them.

I liken it to Radio Shacks now defunct demand that you give them your zip code when you buy batteries. Or Best Buys request for you phone number when you buy anything. My first and last thought is uh no you dont need that and I dont want you to have that... thanks bye bye.

These companies can do their own market research some other way as far as Im concerned.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I responded with the same level of hostility as you Sprig. If you felt like it was more, than perhaps you should look at your own choice of language, because it is exactly on the same level of hostility as I felt.

As for "everything on your computer" i though that we all understood enough about computers here to understand what I meant by that. I'll be more explicit in the future since obviously being concise drives people into thinking I can't possibly know what the hell I'm talking about.

As for the government's "rights," no, they don't. The only conceivable reasons they NEED to know where I am are for law enforcement purposes of for voting.  As I said before, they only need to know where I'm living with sufficient notice before the election for processing purposes.  A month is plenty. As for law enforcement, this is exactly what we fought a revolution over: being treated like a criminal when you are not. I'm not even in a demographic that is statistically more likely to be criminal, so even if you do profiling I'm not needed for that. As I said before, I resent being treated as a criminal when I have done nothing and am not likely to do anything criminal.

Any other service or need the government has for me can be done with a delivery address. They do not need to know withing 4 weeks of a move of 1.5 miles that my address has changed.  The government is there to protect MY rights. It is not the government's right to do ANYTHING.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

the problem is that we believe too much in Thomas Paine and jean jacques Rousseau, Eric.

[House of Mustard]

I have to back up Sprig here: taking a stand on principle is only as good as the principle your standing on.  I'm all for rights of privacy (though I don't really have a problem with any of the issues you've mentioned), but tracking buying preferences seems like a (dare I repeat) silly concern.

Answer one question -- only in regards to cookies, and not in regards to other privacy issues: What are you afraid of?  What real, tangible concern do you have?

[House of Mustard]

the problem is that we believe too much in Thomas Paine and jean jacques Rousseau, Eric.

So which one of you is the profiteer and which one is the mysoginist?

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I'm again' women on principle.

Anyway, my real, tangible concern is that not all cookies are that innocent. many, many are much more invasive and some even dangerous. I know how they work, but I don't know how to examine them for what they do, nor do I have the time to examine every cookie I download. Therefore, I block them all unless I'm familiar with the site and know what the cookie is needed for. Then I generally allow it for the session then go in and delete it with only a few exceptions where I know the coder personally.

Therefore, I will not shop at places that insist I have a cookie when there are ways around what they have the cookie for.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I don't think divorcing cookies from the myriad of other inconveniences we suffer when we shop is a valid concept. What real tangible concerns do I have? The same ones I have when I get asked what my phone number is in best Buy or what my zip code is in Toys R Us, that I don't need or want to be inconvenienced because someone needs my market data. Why does Best Buy need to ask me what my phone number is, they don't at Target or Wal Mart and those stores seem to be doing just fine. Likewise as Saint said Amazon doesnt require cookies to browse... imagine an employee following you around the store taking notes on what products your looking at. Its intrusive, especially since its a proven fact that large companies sell the data to other companies. I dont want my data sold, and its not like they ask your permission to collect or sell it. Its a given, at least to them. Its asking your phone number or zip code by hiring a private detective to follow you home... Ok not so extreme, but often those cookies record what area you live in, and a whole slew of other things I really dont want some faceless corporation to know. Im much happier with the concept of registering on a site than I am getting random cookies from it. The other aspect is the accuracy of the data that companies get, if you browse from work and then home your now two people. If you go through a proxy serve your now 3, if you use someone elses machine 4 and so on. Since the bulk of americans who websurf or use computers are likely to use them in multiple places the data they collect cant be great.  As for Thomas Paine and Jean jacques Rousseau, its not important that the men were flawed, as all men are, its important that they saw a different better future. I mean why dont you just say Martin Luther King was an adulterer and then forget the good the man did, or that George Washington was a slave owner I hope the good of men is not entirely destroyed by their flaws.

[House of Mustard]

Jeffe, SE did a good job of presenting a tangible concern.  You just continued with the alarmist conspiracies.  You compare cookies to a private detective, or an employee following you around taking notes, and cookies are neither of those things.  Cookies feed millions of numbers into a giant marketing calculator.  No one, wearing a black suit and sunglasses, sitting in a dark room behind a computer is saying: "Jeffe reads Thomas Paine?  He must be a profiteer!"

As for the other, obviously I was just making a joke.  If you want me to defend my comments, I could take the semantic route:  You said that you believe too much in Thomas Paine and Rosseau, which would imply that you believe in all of their philosophies (such as Paine's huge windfall of money from Common Sense, and his quick exit to Europe when the fighting got tough), or Rosseau's belief that women's very existence makes misery inevitable.  (Seriously!  That wasn't an offhand remark -- it was his freaking thesis!)  What you should have said was that you believe in Paine's and Rousseau's concept of personal liberty.  And then you should have added a caveat that you thought women ought to be included, too.

Or I could argue it the revisionist way:  That ignoring the bad in people (heroification) dehumanizes their accomplishments, and thus dilutes the value of any of their statements.  To neglect to say that Martin Luther King was an adulterer, or to make George Washington appear flawless, makes their accomplishments remote and less meaningful, because we don't believe we (imperfect people) can ever be like them.

Either way, I meant it as a joke.  Thanks for getting offended.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

which would imply that you believe in all of their beliefs (such as Paine's huge windfall of money from Common Sense, and his quick exit to Europe when the fighting got tough)

But really, who doesn't believe in that?

[House of Mustard]

Oops.  I meant "philosophies".  I've edited it.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

actually, I was talking about believing in cutting and running when things get rough.

[House of Mustard]

Yeah, I figured that's what you meant, but I also realized my statement was poorly worded.

[n8sumsion]

I'm all about defending my right to privacy. Even if I'm not ashamed of any of the web-sites I visit, I don't really feel it's anyone's else's business but mine. But if I want to visit someone's web site, I'm going to play by their rules. Same with visiting their store, if I'm going to be harassed by sales people every time I turn around, odds are I won't go back there. If I don't like how a web-site handles my visit, I don't go back. I guess I don't see this business of cookies as an invasion of my privacy, since I'm going to their sites. If a site I never visited were jumping onto my machine, installing things, and collecting info without me knowing it, then I would be mad. And that's what I use Ad-Aware for. About every 2 weeks, I run it to clear off all the data-miners that are installed on my machine from my surfing. (Although, to be honest, I do this less out of privacy concerns, and more just because I use a dial-up connection and I don't like anything else running in the background that I don't know about).

I think it's dangerous to just write off all concerns about right to privacy as paranoia. I want to be able to live my life the way I want to live it without my government stepping in and saying I'm not allowed to. But I have no grudge against letting the government know where I live.

I think it's a great thing to have principles and stand by them, whether or not anyone else in the world thinks they're worth anything. There are a lot of principles expressed by people on this board that drive me crazy, but I would never expect to have the right to tell them they can't think that way, or expect the government to step in and do the same. People are free in this country to be as stupid or as smart as they want to be.

And since we're talking about businesses here, at the start of the thread, I've always found that the best way to get through to a business is to take your business elsewhere, and let them know why you're doing it.