[thelist] MS Passport = evil scourge of modern man?

Martin martin at members.evolt.org
Wed Aug 16 16:45:04 CDT 2000


rudy limeback wrote on 16/8/00 8:24 pm

>if the ms passport has the potential for abuse, it's like i said in a 
>similar rant a few months ago concerning the air miles card, anybody that 
>chooses to use one of these things is crazy (no offence to people that use 
>air miles cards)

Hey, my new boss used to run AirMiles...

>still, if the big corps actually and truly *did* know my shopping/browsing 
>habits, then maybe they would leave me alone with all their other 
>materialistic crap that i don't want?
That's the idea - the marketing dictum is that 90% of spend is wasted. If
you can identify *which* 90%, then you're on a winner. This means using
the personal info you have to target, target, target (and not mail people
who aren't likely to respond).

> please stop interrupting [foo good thing] with [bar ad]

Have a look at Seth Godin's Permission Marketing (an extended rant against
interruption marketing) - link on my library article. Compare against
the UK's Data Protection Legislation (data must be obtained fairly, be
kept up to date, disclosed to the data subject, held only for as long as
necessary, not disclosed to anyone you haven't registered to disclose
it to. There are particularly stringent rules in place for 'sensitive'
data ie health, finance, political activity, sexual behaviour etc etc).

This is why UK co's are having trouble exporting data to the US where
the regime is much laxer (dunno about Canada).

If in doubt, register with the .co.uk variant of a site...

Cheers
Martin

------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: martin at members.evolt.org              PGP ID: 0xA835CCCB
  tel: +44 (0)778 068 6418                snailmail: 30 Shandon Place
 http://evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=9&uid=32            Edinburgh, Scotland





More information about the thelist mailing list