[ExI] 'Stalking' is now a business plan

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 4:11 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> Google on your email @, see what I mean.

It used to be that you could have a gmail account just by signing up.
Now you either need to authenticate your identity via another account
or by providing a phone number to receive texts.

Stalking has always been a business plan.  It was "contact management"
and before computers it was being a "go getter" that allowed someone
to track you down or find you out.

It used to be expensive - if you wanted to know where a potentially
cheating spouse was during the day, you had to hire an investigator to
spend a 1:1 amount of time investigating.  Today you can have software
do the tedious work and that ratio goes to one investigator for a
thousand or a million people.

It's not even nefarious.  People sign up for tracking... er...
shoppers club cards to get $0.50 off a box of hot pockets.  Actually a
typical American is signing up to get $1.00 off 5 boxes of hot
pockets: we're not so good at the $0.20/box < $0.50/box math, instead
focusing only on the 5 boxes > 1 box metric.  I digress.