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From: johne@hp-vcd.HP.COM (John Eaton)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: A second look at Lotus Marketplace: Households
Message-ID: <6750027@hp-vcd.HP.COM>
Date: 4 Jun 91 15:54:10 GMT
References: <42889@cup.portal.com>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Vancouver, WA
Lines: 29

<<<<
< Before you say "The very idea of such a product is objectionable",
< let me point out (as Brad Templeton noted in an earlier posting)
< that all the information Lotus was going to sell is already
< available.  This information *WILL* be sold -- the only question
< is who will sell it.
----------
The question is in what form will the information will be provided.
Computers have allowed us to take the same old information that has
always been available and process it to derive new information.
Databases can be combined and relationships that were previously
undetectable can be discovered. For example when the only phone
listing available is in paper form it becomes next to impossible
to discover who is living with who. But in computer form you simply
sort by phone number and identify multiple numbers with different
names. You now know who is living with who.

In the old days thieves would "case" a neighborhood and try to find
a house with lots of pawnable items and no one home. Now you can
query a database for a list of homes with the desired consumer
profile within a certain neighborhood.If one looks empty then you
can call their number from your cellular to make sure. If no one
answers then you can break in. Of course they never explained that
buying a super mongo stereo on plastic could have these side effects

John Eaton
!hp-vcd!johne