How’s this for a tinfoil hat conspiracy, brought to you by the American Life League–
Planned Parenthood’s strategy in this great world is to:
Phase one: Get kids addicted to sex.
Phase two: profit! Through selling birth control, STD testing, and abortion.
In case you missed it, here’s a pointer to a recent Times story concerning baked reviews on Amazon and the like. In it, David Streitfeld describes how one company gave rebates to customers in exchange for five star reviews. They even seem to have a claque to address detractors–
Even a few grouches could not spoil the party. “This is an egregious violation of the ratings and review system used by Amazon,” a customer named Robert S. Pollock wrote in a review he titled “scam.”
He was promptly chastised by another customer. This fellow, himself a seller on Amazon, argued that he had both given and gotten free items in exchange for reviews. “It is not a scam but an incentive,” he wrote.
You might recall the hysteria surrounding recent Federal Trade Commission rules on sponsored endorsements by bloggers. The agency had this type of situation in mind–average consumers, without any understanding of the rules or “ethics” of advertising are pimping products to others. It’s unfair to competitors and other consumers. And it totally messes up my default shopping strategy of just buying the highest rated [insert product here] on Amazon!
Evgeny Morozov argued in Slate last week that search engines could do more to warn readers about kooks online. Among other things, he cites to a recent article in Vaccine that details the tactics of anti-vaccine denialists. Morozov points to Google’s special treatment of certain searches, such as “ways to die.” Perhaps an alert can appear when one searches, “should I vaccinate…”
Denialism fans, you might enjoy the archive of informercials at my favorite website, Everything is Terrible. It’s so much fun to watch all those lame infomercials from the 80s and 90s and realize how little has changed in the marketing world.
Okay, back to Chair Dancing.
Writing in the Saturday (how to make it look like you’re rich edition) of the Wall Street Journal, Marisa Acocella Marchetto mentions an expensive, branded drug–Nexium–eight times. She even mentions its slogan (“the purple pill”)!
As Mark has written elsewhere, it’s moronic to take Nexium because there are cheaper, efficacious alternatives, such as Prilosec, which is available over the counter. Consumer Reports noted in 2010 that Nexium was the most expensive PPI, at $248 a month, and that cheaper generics and over the counter medicines were available.
In the story, she describes being trapped on an airplane without her precious Nexium and in serious pain (why not try something that would immediately stop the pain, such as Tums?). She begs for Nexium, and lo–another passenger has a doctor misinformed enough to prescribe it. But the evil flight attendant won’t let her have it, falsely believing that Marchetto was having a heart attack. Finally, there is an emergency landing, and an Irish physician treats her and “handed [her] a Nexium.” How convenient!
I wonder why the editors of the Journal allowed this specific and expensive product to be mentioned so many times. Ironically, if she had simply asked for a antacid, she would have had been given Maalox by the flight attendant. Problem solved. The entire article could have been rewritten: “How I caused an international flight to be diverted because I demanded to be provided an expensive prescription drug by a flight attendant and how if I had just asked for an antacid everything would have been fine.”
The article makes me recall the time I was in Atlanta airport, and the person in front of me asked a cashier, “all you have is water–don’t you have Dasani?” It’s that type of stupidity that keeps brands alive and wastes billions of consumer dollars.
Full disclosure: although I mentioned Nexium(R) numerous times in this blog post, I have not received any material support from AstraZeneca nor am I taking the Purple Pill and washing it down with Dasani.
Those of you who read Mark Zuckerberg’s oped in today’s Washington Post might appreciate my take on how Facebook talks about privacy in tomorrow’s San Francisco Chronicle: The Privacy Machiavellis.
A response is requested from a non-scientist.
Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.” This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults’ attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced than portrayed in the popular media.
A UC-Berkeley Law/U. Penn Annenberg team recently commissioned a telephonic (wireline and wireless) survey of internet using Americans (N=1000) on privacy. The findings are presented in How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?
The major findings include–
Why does it seem then that young adults behave with such license, particularly on social network sites?
A gap in privacy knowledge provides one explanation. 42 percent of young Americans answered all of our five online privacy questions incorrectly. 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly. The problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues–post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.
We conclude then that that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.
Cross-posted at Technology | Academics | Policy
Naftali Bendavid reports today in the Journal on a problem facing conservatives: how should they assure their supporters, many of whom are suspicious of government activity, to participate in the US Census? After all, the Census sounds suspiciously like something Tiberius would like. But Moses was a fan too. And now Karl Rove is pitching the Census.
Ron Paul argues:
“The census should be nothing more than a headcount,” Mr. Paul wrote this month in his weekly column. “It was never intended to serve as a vehicle for gathering personal information on citizens.”
It should be noted that Paul is factually incorrect. Jefferson and Madison were strong proponents of expanding the enumeration, from the very first Census. But it is also true that privacy concerns have always plagued the Census.
Congress has an opportunity to address some of these privacy concerns. As I’ve written elsewhere, advances in “reidentification” have made it possible to determine the identities of Census participants. The Census Bureau has known about this problem for a long time, and has engaged in serious, well-respected research into solving it. However, the law has not kept up with the problem. Under 13 USC § 9(a)(2), the Department of Commerce is prohibited from “mak[ing] any publication whereby the [Census] data furnished by any particular establishment or individual under this title can be identified.” Thus, the Census Bureau must protect the identities of those who participate in the enumeration. But this law does not restrain private action. As a result, companies and others are free to try to strip citizens of their anonymity when participating in the Census, and even sell back the data to other government entities.
Conservatives could take a step towards allaying these concerns by extending Title 13 to prohibit private-sector efforts to reidentify participants of the Census. Germany has already done this. Unless this step is taken, it’s just a matter of time before this government-mandated enumeration results in an enormous transfer of personal information to those unethical enough to reidentify and attempt to profit from it.
Cross posted at The Berkeley Blog