Can you disappear in surveillance Britain?
women.timesonline.co.uk
women.timesonline.co.uk
They'll ask you all sorts of questions, and since the parents are all happy about their new baby they'll comply without a second thought. They'll then sell all this data to a data trading company. It's valuable because the nappy company has verified the data, and also having a baby is a major lifestyle change that other companies are keen to use. For example you might need a new car that's family friendly with more space in the back for the kids.
"Are you happy for us to contact you with special deals etc"
"Are you happy for us to pass on your details to other carefully selected partners"
You get a bag full of free samples, they get a potential lead which may convert to a full time user of their product.
I don't really see any privacy issues with it personally.
But after you've given the info, then it's 'oh you have to let us sell the data to get the stuff', and most of the time they don't just want to sell your anonymous little data points as part of an aggregated statistical picture, but your name and address as well as your customer data. It's not so different from giving out 'free' browser toolbars or smiley collections, except that in the fine print they also claim you've given permission for them to install a browsing monitor and what-all else.
And as regards baby products, they're taking advantage of the fact that new parents are usually exhausted and overwhelmed both practically and emotionally - not just for a first baby either, and this doesn't conflict with feeling happy. It's still stressful even if you're thrilled.
Carrying out a commercial transaction under the guise of friendly generosity at a time of unusual emotional upheaval is rather unethical. Consider too that not only do they want info about the parents; they're building a marketing profile on the kid that has just been (or even, is about to be) born, and realistically that data footprint is going to live longer than the actual person.
In find that creepy. YMMV, but even though I appreciate your point about it being a trade-off, it disturbs me that there's no easy route to finding who has your information and what they store. In many countries you can write and request that information of a company, but there's a lot of companies out there.
I remember getting a few free samples of nappies. For us, Huggies were terrible, and Pampers worked great. It would have been a pain to figure that out by buying 2 big packs of nappies.
So for me, it was a really useful thing. And Pampers got what they wanted - to put their product in the hands of people who might want to buy it.
I don't think anyone anywhere would not be aware that freebies/samples are given out for a reason. And the reason certainly isn't generosity.
Also, personally, I don't much care who has my 'information'. For these sort of companies they basically have your name and address. Worst they can do is send round a salesperson.
This economic datum alone is good for about 15 years of highly predictable target marketing. Long after the baby has stopped wetting itself, the data can be sold to other marketers, who are eager to have it because it's predictable that the child will need new clothes every year, attend school around age 4, want toys around birthday and Xmas, and so on and on. It's worth a lot more than some sample packs of toiletries and baby formula.
http://www.metafilter.com/91492/Can-a-person-disappear-in-su...
This seems like something we'll be seeing more and more of. No, not the surveillance (though that's probably true), but rather the idea of disappearance as a game. Kind of like hide-and-seek for wealthy adults. Another recent example: Evan Ratliff (of Wired) and his efforts to evade discovery.
Maybe an opportunity for a startup? Maybe an idea for a TV show, like Big Brother meets The Amazing Race?
I keep wondering how long it will be until the people of the U.K. realize whose company they are in (Russia and China), pull their heads out of their @$$, and reverse course.
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Erasing_David/70134394?strack...
My last contact with the law there was when I parked my car in a bad spot and the local police, 400 yards away from my apartment in Aberdeen, were completely unable to find me.
Hilarious. That was 1991 or so.
I can't find the stat at the moment, but generally they can't find most absent parents.
The worrying thing is not the 'surveillance' or 'privacy'. It's how obsessed and unhinged this man is, putting ridiculous things before his own family.
tl;dr = Man gets obsessed about privacy, Leaves his wife and kids for a fun chase. Detectives find his facebook page, work out where wife is having baby, phone hospital pretend to be him, and when something is wrong with baby they all turn up and detectives get him. WTF does that prove?
"The average UK adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day by nearly five million CCTV cameras."
Is designed to scare people. Even though it's BS. Most of those cameras are firstly in massive cities. Secondly, most of them are simply connected to some dumb VHS recorder that only gets checked if there is some crime.
Personally, I think it's more important for him to support his wife and kids rather than running off and pretending to be a spy.
Also, first rule of hiding, don't have a pregnant wife or dependents, because hiding will be pretty hard.
As Bond became more obsessed, Katie became increasingly annoyed. They argued over filling in a form for Ivy’s nursery. “They can use this data for God knows what!” Bond yelled. “I thought, for God’s sake, no one else worries about this,” Katie remembers. “Why do we have to?” She tried to reassure him: “It’s fine. They’re not going to do anything weird with our data. If some kind of weird government comes in, we’ll opt out.” He wasn’t convinced.
And that's very naive thing for her to say... Weird governments don't let you just "opt out".
You only have to look at the criticism of Mi5 not having the resources to track people they knew were potential terrorists when they crossed paths with people they were actively tracking to know that the chances that anything I do all day even being looked at by a human are almost nothing.
Also my experience dealing with HMRC shows me even people in the civil service who are paid to know what I'm doing suffer from such data disorganisation and unconnection that I have no fears at all about it's use.
I'm far more worried about how it is stored and secured, and also how commercial entities that have power over my status in society (read credit agencies) gather and do not verify data that may, through no fault of my own, affect my life. One of my friends from way back had someone elses credit black list applied to her purely based on them having the same name even though they live in completely different areas of the country.
The problem wasn't my privacy, the problem was that I moved out of an address, some junk mail came for me after I'd left, and so the new resident used my name to run up some bills.
You can steal identities by simply knowing a name and an address such is the broken credit check system.
That's not proving that things need to be stored and secured better. It's showing that credit agencies need to actually use some common sense. (In my case the fraudulent entries didn't even match my date of birth).
Another way to research a documentary about privacy, or lack thereof, would be to go do a bunch of interviews with detectives, police, and DB admins at Tesco. Yawn. This guy chose to live the experience of trying to hide - he's not pretending to be a spy, he's pretending to be spied on. As another commenter said, this is his job, it's how he supports him family.
Well, lots of people live in those massive cities...and by cities, I mean anywhere with a population of >100k or so. It's easy to be blase about it from a viewer's perspective. I lived in London from 88-96 and was surprised to see how much surveillance increased during that time. On the rare occasions when I go back I find it quite unpleasant and intrusive to see so many cameras.
Certainly one can argue the old 'if you're not doing anything wrong...' position. But what's 'wrong' is not guaranteed to be fair or consistent, but can change quite quickly if the political climate shifts - and it's comforting but mistaken to assume all our mistakes are behind us and things can only improve. Sometimes they decline, and under those circumstances ubiquitous surveillance paired with ample state funding for technological improvements presents a serious danger. Consider that by the time the Berlin wall fell, the East German secret police operated a network of informers estimated to comprise ~2% of the whole population - some claim it was much higher. that's not a healthy use of resources or authority.
Didn't downvote you BTW - I disagree but I don't consider a variance in opinion justifies all the negatives.
Companies, shops, town councils, decide independently to install cameras.
To be honest, it sounds really lame, particularly his freaking out and so on, given the entire thing is contrived for a TV show.
Plus I would say - wtf disappearing for a month with his wife heavily pregnant. Bullshit "work commitments". What on earth could have prevented them doing it in 3 or 6 months??