2084 Thinking in thirteen

This week I completed my fourth Thursday Thirteen, a meme to challenge the blogger with new ideas and to bring new people (and returnees) to your site. Here's the results. You can see that Thursday is a big day.

Obviously, everyone's a slacker on Saturday and are off finding things to blog about the rest of the week. My first TT was Jan. 5, then 12th, 19th and 26th.

Here's mid-October-November, 2005


So some are just stop and peek, but a few keep coming back.

This entry is about Thursday Thirteen, but it is also about my stats. I have a little freebie stat counter--you can see it over on the left, and I also have another one that doesn't show, and it looks at a different range of things. If I were willing to pay for an ungrade, God only knows what else I'd know about you besides your ISP, your city, how many times you've returned, how you got here, what keywords you used, etc. And I know you're out there looking at me and dropping little cookies along the way so the big bad wolf called "No Privacy" can find me.

The news media and blogs have been full of the outrage over the government requesting, not names, but statistics from Google for porn searches. Google has said "No." Lots of unhappy libertarian and Democrats over this one. Brought the Bush-bashing to new levels.

Well folks, that horse got out of the barn and fled years ago. Any passworded staff member of any library, credit card company, hospital, mortgage lender, retail store, membership organization, etc. can look at your private information, and that capability has been out there for years.

The Bureau of Motor Vehicles has been selling your personal information since long before we had personal computers or anyone heard of porn on the internet. So have the utility companies. Insurance companies have been sharing your personal medical information at least since the 70s when I first read an article about the huge databases that were maintained, and maybe before that.

When my husband first became a sole proprietor in 1993, we got all kinds of offers for "lists;" by ZIP, by phone number, by hobby, by house size, by automobile make--I'm sure if we'd inquired, we could have bought a pornography list, a gay list, a leather list, etc. [that string ought to bring 'em here] You and your life's details are out there for a price, for sale to absolutely anyone.

All these loyalty cards you've signed up for at CVS or Krogers or one of the airlines for "free" miles? All that information is sold--but usually with your name. Had a speeding ticket, DUI, brought a law suit or been in a brawl that brought out the police? It's all in your county court system's databases that are out there for anyone to see.

Want to know where the doors and windows are in your victim's house and what streets and alleys are near by for escape? Just check your county auditor's website that provides a photo and floor plan of all the homes along with the valuations. So unless you are visiting child porn sites, I don't know what the fuss is about, because you and I certainly lost the privacy battle going on 20-30 years now.

"The federal government's requests [of Google]--which amount to a list of 1 million random Web addresses and a week's worth of search queries--is supposed to help the government build a case that Internet porn is readily accessible to minors, thus creating a need for its once-denied Child Online Protection Act (COPA)." Forbes

A quarter of all internet searches are for porn. Don't you believe it that Google (which I love) guys stay up at night thinking of ways to protect your privacy. Porn is a huge part of the search engine business, and probably the stat businesses you and I are using "for free."

This is about money. Not privacy. Not civil liberties.

Thursday Thirteen
Privacy
pornography
COPA