Spying on you for your own good
Sunday, June 1st, 2008Charter Communications has announced that it will soon begin wiretapping its customers.
Well. They don’t call it wiretapping of course, they call it…”enhanced user experience.” By which they mean they will be looking at your web browser activity in detail, and inserting their own targeted ads based on whatever you happened to be doing at the time. Which, you might have imagined, was your own business.
I hardly know where to begin. Far from a paragon of virtue to start with, Charter proposes to invade the privacy of your private communications. Trust them, they promise they aren’t stealing credit card numbers or checking to see who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Come on, if you can’t trust a big corporation who can you trust?
Surely they’ve got a good reason to demand you give up your rights, not to mention your peace of mind. Be assured, they do. But it’s not to protect you from terrorism, nor to protect your children from pedophiles, nor to stop spam or viruses from getting to your computer. They want to do it so you can enjoy more ads. That is, after all what you use the Internet for, right? Looking at commercials?
