Do you do online surveys?

[Marlin]

You are trading your personal privacy for a few bucks. More power to you. The problem is that few people understand the ramifications of giving away their privacy until it bites them in the sass, at which point it is too late to get your privacy back.

One example - toll road transponders like EzPass. Much easier than paying cash - and frequently cheaper too. The problem is that all the records of your ezpass use end up as a permanent record in their database. Those records have turned out to be a gold mine for divorce attorneys looking to prove infidelity (civil cases only require a "preponderance of evidence" not "beyond a reasonable doubt"). Saved a few bucks up front but those people ended up losing 1000x what they saved in their divorce settlements.

Not the same as filling out surveys and scanning in all your purchases - but it isn't difficult to see scenarios where that becomes a problem too. Lets say you smoke and you fill out a survey about how many packs a day you smoke - maybe sometime in the future your health insurance decides to decline coverage to people with a history of smoking as much as you admitted to in that survey. Or maybe it isn't something so obvious - say you don't smoke but you eat a lot of junk food and in 10 years time the war on junk food has made it politically correct to treat junk food eaters as badly as smokers and you can't get a job because you have a record of eating too much junk food (just like a few hopsitals now refuse to hire smokers).

You can't know the future - giving away your privacy for a few bucks is like opening pandora's box. You have no idea what you are letting loose with your privacy but once it is out there in the hands of amoral corps and their government lapdog you'll never ever be able to put it back in the box again.

For me, the trade-off of a few hundred bucks in hand against who knows what kafkaseque future is not even close to being worth it.

So by your logic, I assume you don't use a credit card or check card. You pay full price for things at the grocery store vice using the store discount card. You don't have a cell phone, or cable/satellite tv or ISP? You don't do online banking? Drivers license, taxes, airline tickets, bills, you give away so much information for free, might as well get paid a bit.

If you spend your time worrying about stuff like that, that means you have something to worry about. Its pretty easy, don't cheat on your spouse, don't lie on applications or to your doctor. As for the junk food thing, they would have to oust the 80% of our nation that is obese. Mexicans will have taken over by then, so no worries.

As for the surveys, they never ask for your name or address or phone number and so on. All they ask is your birth year, sometimes date, but I give em the wrong date, right year, sex, and skin color. If they ever ask for more, which I can't remember any of them doing, then I don't participate. The scanner one does know my shopping habits, but buying various items does not mean I eat them? I can buy a gun tomorrow, doesn't mean I am going to shoot someone with it. That is 100% circumstantial, the fact that a lawyer gets away with **** like that is another problem in our country...a bit off topic.

By the way, I just pulled up your profile, now I have your email, your city, how many posts, when you were logged in....j/k, well, I can get those things, but you get the point. You cannot be secure in today's world. Its like social security numbers, the military uses it for EVERYTHING!!! Now they are heading to last 4 only, but we have schedules posted, now I know when I everyone has duty, when they are going to appointments and so on... there is no such thing as privacy. I also think of internet passwords, the longer they become, the better the program that hacks them becomes.