CSotD: Mr. Haney goes high tech
Skip to comments
One of the recurring gags in the underestimated surrealist comedy, "Green Acres," was that, just as an apparent need arose, hustler and conman Mr. Haney would appear on the doorstep with a solution.
As noted in today's The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Mr. Haney's truck has gone high tech, thanks to Google and our willingness to swap privacy for convenience. Or at least to look the other way.
A few weeks ago, a client and I started talking about a workshop in Denver. Everything was approved but a check still needed to be cut for expenses. In the meantime, I went over to the Delta site and began to look at potential flights and ticket prices.
By the next morning, web sites I visited had begun to feature embedded ads noting that Delta flies to Denver and encouraging me to do the same.
Then, having set a date for the workshops, I began to plan a trip to Minnesota to visit a couple of grandchildren (and their parents). Sure enough, I was now also getting ads pointing out that Delta flies to Minneapolis.
No other cities. Just the two I had been looking into. And no other airlines: This was clearly a case of "Hey! Get back here and buy something!"
Which also happened when I looked at prices for flea and tick repellant at a pet-care site, only they were more direct and the ads there — embedded in unrelated sites — kept reminding (nagging) me that I had some unfinished business to attend to at 1800PedMeds.
I finally made the Frontline purchase and those ads quit appearing, but, despite holding tickets for both Denver and Minneapolis, Delta still seems convinced that I'd like, perhaps, to go each place a few more times.
It's kind of creepy, because the "get back here!" notices appear not only on unrelated web sites, but on web sites I visit through different browsers.
I'm not a privacy freak in the sense of fearing what might happen. I just don't like being followed around.
But it happens. I've lived in a house where the mail was being opened and I suppose the phones were tapped. We knew the FBI was reading the mail because they were quite blatant about knowing things they couldn't have known otherwise.
I was never a target of their surveillance. As a good future journalist, I was always more of an onlooker than a participant and, while I probably made the files, it would only be in the context of "also present was …" and "other people living there included …"
Nothing with any real Rebel-Alliance cred. If I had my own folder, those knuckleheads were wasting more taxpayer money and creating an even more unmanageable slush pile of data than I suspected.
Which is kind of where I stand on privacy: Following all of us is more or less the same as following none of us, and having seen cases where they didn't act on things they certainly should have known about has made me feel that whatever information they were so intent on collecting is now sitting in nondescript shipping cases on nondescript pallets in the same faceless warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant was re-lost at the end of Raiders.
Granted, there are times when the gummint suddenly yanks some hapless person out of line at an airport because he's got the same name as someone on the terror watchlist — often the Muslim equivalent of "John Brown" — and puts the poor schlemazel through hell.
But, while it certainly sucks to be that guy, it's more of a testimony to what they don't know than to what they do.
I mean, when the Thought Police busted in on Winston Smith and his girlfriend, dragged them out of their love nest and disappeared them into the bowels of the machine, at least they had the right couple.
If that happened in real life, it would be some guy named Lyndon Smythe visiting his grandmother at a nursing home.
There is, of course, a difference between government surveillance and being spied upon by private industry.
This should not make you feel better about the kind of thing in today's Edison Lee, because it's reasonable to assume that private industry would not only do a better job of selecting targets and processing and utilizing the information gained, but of persuading their targets to cheerfully provide all that information so they don't have to sneak around gathering it.
As Hilary Price noted six years ago.
(Speaking of Edison Lee, the Kickstarter campaign continues. I've already given.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 3
Comments are closed.