Beth H. (suburbanalien) reviewed Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move on + 63 more book reviews
Even though the book was written in 2006, the information and the message is highly relevant and very useful today. You need to read this, you need to know this. How you react is up to you - the writers of course feel very strongly about this topic and that's no secret. Doing some research on the internet, there is a wide acceptance of this technology and many people who voluntarily embrace it, as well as many corporations who make no secret about it's use.
The scandal is rarely in the scandalous details ... it's in the coverup of the scandal. The hidden language in the advertising with the truth revealed in the patent documents, the denials of the usage of the technology then the expose of the lies, the implication that this technology can be used to punish despite the constant protests of the powers that be that they do not plan on using it to punish, and then the icky realization that it may already be too late. Again, how you react is up to you.
Very recently in the news near us in NC there was a story that broke that said the City of Charlotte, which has mandatory recycling laws (for business, residential recycling is considered "encouraged but not enforced"), was issuing everyone new recycling bins. Yay, they're new and pretty, so much easier for the trucks to pick up, all is well. After they were distributed, someone found out that there were spychips in the bins that would identify the individual bin (much more specific than a bar code) to its household, and there is a reader on the truck that picks them up. The bin would be weighed, the contents reported, with that specific chip which identifies the household. This information would then be reported to the regulatory agency. Thus the agency in charge of enforcing the recycling law now has a way to spy on each individual household and see what, and how much, they acutally recycle. They didn't tell the consumers this ahead of time. Politicians claimed they didn't know about it. The newspaper articles that came out beforehand cheered the new bins, with no mention of the spychips, claiming after the fact that they didn't know either. Well heck SOMEONE knew about it! Where'd it all come from, Skynet (machines ruling the world, Terminator reference)? Looking into it a little bit more, you will find articles from the company providing the chips that they found the way to make money in recycling is by selling the data collected (i.e. what you buy and how much you use) to marketers. Also by connecting the dots, you can see it would not take long to make recycling mandatory and enforce it, issue fines, whatever they can do using the data the chips collect on individual households.
Again ... facts of a scandal not nearly as interesting as the coverup.
Read this book, you'll be glad you did, and you'll know more about what's going on now than perhaps you really want to.
The scandal is rarely in the scandalous details ... it's in the coverup of the scandal. The hidden language in the advertising with the truth revealed in the patent documents, the denials of the usage of the technology then the expose of the lies, the implication that this technology can be used to punish despite the constant protests of the powers that be that they do not plan on using it to punish, and then the icky realization that it may already be too late. Again, how you react is up to you.
Very recently in the news near us in NC there was a story that broke that said the City of Charlotte, which has mandatory recycling laws (for business, residential recycling is considered "encouraged but not enforced"), was issuing everyone new recycling bins. Yay, they're new and pretty, so much easier for the trucks to pick up, all is well. After they were distributed, someone found out that there were spychips in the bins that would identify the individual bin (much more specific than a bar code) to its household, and there is a reader on the truck that picks them up. The bin would be weighed, the contents reported, with that specific chip which identifies the household. This information would then be reported to the regulatory agency. Thus the agency in charge of enforcing the recycling law now has a way to spy on each individual household and see what, and how much, they acutally recycle. They didn't tell the consumers this ahead of time. Politicians claimed they didn't know about it. The newspaper articles that came out beforehand cheered the new bins, with no mention of the spychips, claiming after the fact that they didn't know either. Well heck SOMEONE knew about it! Where'd it all come from, Skynet (machines ruling the world, Terminator reference)? Looking into it a little bit more, you will find articles from the company providing the chips that they found the way to make money in recycling is by selling the data collected (i.e. what you buy and how much you use) to marketers. Also by connecting the dots, you can see it would not take long to make recycling mandatory and enforce it, issue fines, whatever they can do using the data the chips collect on individual households.
Again ... facts of a scandal not nearly as interesting as the coverup.
Read this book, you'll be glad you did, and you'll know more about what's going on now than perhaps you really want to.
