“There's an absence of consumer rights and a large number of small actors who are mostly criminals. Dealing with them is like swatting flies one by one, rather than putting up a fence to keep out all the dogs.”
“A common tactic in direct mail is to disguise the nature of the solicitation and send you something that doesn't indicate what's inside, to make you open the envelope. People aren't opening the 'mystery envelopes' right now.”
“That's like saying we can't have privacy laws for telephones to protect the privacy of telephone conversations because that might spill over into other areas,”
“It's intolerable that e-mail can be used to silently zap a name tag onto you that might be scanned by a site you visit later. It's like secretly bar-coding people with invisible ink,”
“They all find out that you opened the mail and they get an invisible tracking number, so if you go to a store ... that number is reported to them and they can build that information into a database,”
“Amazon wants to protect themselves from later [customer] lawsuits that claim, 'We weren't told,' ... They also want to leave the door open if they need to sell off a division or claim bankruptcy. They know that their consumer database is one of their most valuable assets, so they want to give themselves max flexibility--which means less privacy for customers.”
