Amboy Monthly Update- Editorial

From ARG Guide/Trail Wiki

27 April 2004

YOU HAVE BEEN PRE-APPROVED!

by Melody Heller, AmboyMonthly.com

I was sorting through my US postal mail today, deciding what to keep and open and what to send to the round filing cabinet. Ten letters; one from the Community College where I am a student, one a magazine subscription renewal, one from the veterinarian telling me that my mother's calico cat, Sheba, was due for her booster shots. The other seven were bulk/direct mail creations; a request for a donation from a charitable organization, a coupon book for local stores, and five offers of pre-approved credit cards.

I suppose I could equate the amount of unsolicited mail to the amount of “spam” on the internet, but as I winged each intrusion to the waste basket, it crossed my mind that since starting college, I have received an alarming number of credit offers, and the amount of spam I have to shovel out of my e-mail box has slowly increased since I opened up the Amboy Monthly on-line edition. It occurred to me that both cultural phenomenon are the result of the same type of activity.

Data Mining.

Your secrets are not your own any more. Every time you use a preferred shopper card, credit card, enter to win a contest, open a bank account, get a mortgage, reply to e-mail, somewhere some program will be able to locate that information, cross reference it by your address, your telephone number or your social security number and generate an offer especially for you. They can even check out your credit report if they even just think they may want to offer you credit. Five offers of pre-approved credit. We don't even have that many banks within spitting distance on a day with gale force winds. Yet they all seem to know about me. All entered in a computer somewhere by clerks making minimum wage.

Better still are the spyware programs that are downloaded with something you want, and skip the fine print on the down load agreement and click the accept link and drink it down, without knowing or caring that there is hemlock in that wine. They log websites, mouse clicks, favorite programs, all of which get sent back in little packets and stored in a server in a room full of servers.

All your life history, stored on computers that are not your own.

Do they have a firewall, do they run anti-virus software, do they block requests from questionable IPs? Do you have any reason to trust these nameless, faceless people? Or have they kidnapped your heart and soul and sold it for a price? Daily we see messages promising 14 million valid e-mails on CD. Eighty percent of my incoming e-mail is spam. I certainly didn't sell my e-mail address. Did you?