In this articles I will tell you a little about contracting, present a list of the creepy things that you have agreed to without realising it (including various tracking methods), and provide you a lifeline. Read on.
A contract is a funny thing. In one sense, it’s like a constitution or governing document. Contracts tend to govern business dealings, but they can centre on any legally recognised interest. You can contract with another person to do things, not do things, do things if other things happen, not do things if other things happen, and so forth. Contracts can also be sold, modified, repudiated (that word again), ignored, upheld at bar, invalidated at bar, and they can also expire.
The freedom to contract is among the most basic and fundamental rights offered in enlightened societies. It is also one taken for granted in modern society that courts will generally enforce (through the policing power of the state) the contracts we make with others. Moreover, virtually no one reads the contracts they affix their name to, and that’s a problem, as most liability in life can be avoid simply by reading the words you are agreeing to when you click “I agree.”
Here is a list of creepy things you’ve probably agreed to, but don’t know it. For fun, I’ve omitted the sources and context.
We might receive information about you from other sources, such as updated delivery and address information from our carrier
We use your personal information to display … ads … that might be of interest to you.
[We] display advertising using information you make available to us when you interact with our sites, content, or services. [These are] personalised or targeted ads, are displayed to you based on information from activities such as purchasing on our sites, visiting [other] sites that contain [our] content or ads, interacting with [our] tools, or using our payment services.
Why is this creepy? Read about how contracts are turning into inference machines.
We do not provide any personal information to advertisers or to third party sites that display our interest-based ads. However, advertisers and other third-parties (including the ad networks, ad-serving companies, and other service providers they may use) may assume that users who interact with or click on a personalized ad or content are part of the group that the ad or content is directed towards (for example, users in Western Canada who bought or browsed for classical music). Also, some third-parties may provide us information about you (such as the sites where you have been shown ads or demographic information) from offline and online sources that we may use to provide you more relevant and useful advertising.
In other words, it’s not who you are that is of interest to retailers but what you do, which allows companies to use huge amounts of processing power to create a profile of you for their own purposes. Creepy, right? The problem is that this information could be weaponised in some way.
The antidote is the Brave web browser. Look what happens when Amazon tries to track me.
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