Comcast Devours Your Life
Privacy shmivacy. The cable-TV beast knows more about you than your own mother. Be very creeped out
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
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You read the little nondescript brochure that came with your Comcast bill called the "Privacy Notice," just to see, just to get a bit of insight as to what the country's largest and greediest and increasingly scariest cable and Internet provider (they just sucked up AT&T Cable last year) actually does with your personal info, and why, and how much they snicker and gloat and hiss like drunken snakes when they do it.
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They will, in short, take this heaping pile of personal data on you and use it in every possible way they can to further their corporate profiteering cause and drown you in more goddamn product, short of coming to your house and nailing your ass to the floorboards and rifling through your desk and cataloguing all your porn and installing hidden cameras in your bathroom, which you just know they'd love to do, if they could.
This is all spelled out in the most abstracted and creepy terms possible, in the Privacy Notice. It's all there and it's mostly completely ignored by 99.8 percent of the population, which is exactly how they want it,
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This article completely pissed me off and did indeed creep me out. I thought I'd share it with you guys. There really should be a law preventing companies from selling our personal information. The thing that pisses me off about Comcast is they also know my families viewing habits which apparently they are tracking.
Also I'm sure I know what Comcast does with all the money they get for selling our information - they spend it on advertising, on the web, on the TV, on the radio - hell, I even saw an advertising on a bag of chips the other day for Comcast. The thing is, it's the only freaking cable company in the area so WHY are they freaking advertising. As an added insult my cable has increased 20 bucks a month since these assholes bought out AT&T cable, last January.
On an added note, the writer writes a great daily newsletter you can get by email that includes his rants on various things, it's really funny and includes a "Mullet Haiku" each week that cracks me up. It's the only newsletter I subscribe to and it's called "The Morning Fix", you can subscribe at the link if you want and you can also read the rest of this article. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/09/24/notes092403.DTLOH yeah, here's my favorite line from the article...They disenfranchise, alienate, induce deeper and deeper mistrust and then get to shove their own agenda down the nation's throat à la Wal-Mart cramming its cute pseudo-Christian antichoice values and savage business practices and landfill merchandise down the numbed maw of small-town America.
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