Sears gets mere wrist slap for allegedly spying on customers
Mitch LipkaSep 14th 2009 at 7:00PM Filed under: Shopping, Consumer Ally
Consumers were outraged when a settlement first reported on WalletPop in June was reached between Sears Holdings over an accusation by the Federal Trade Commission that the owner of Sears and Kmart was spying on the web use and online shopping habits of its customers. They won’t be a lot happier with the ending.
The feds just officially resolved the case after commissioners accepted the proposed settlement and the penalty for Sears’ alleged overzealous, privacy invading behavior wasn’t even a slap on the wrist. It was a gentle touch. The harshest part of whole situation was the FTC actually letting people know the situation even happened.
To join the “My SHC Community,” users downloaded software that ended up grabbing some members’ prescription information, emails, bank account data and purchases on other sites. Sears called the group that participated “small” and said the data captured by the program was at all times secure and was then destroyed.
The FTC filed a complaint against Sears, accusing the retailer of deceiving those who signed up for the service and downloaded the software.
“(Sears) failed to disclose adequately that the software application, when installed, would: monitor nearly all of the Internet behavior that occurs on consumers’ computers, including information exchanged between consumers and websites other than those owned, operated, or affiliated with respondent, information provided in secure sessions when interacting with third-party websites, shopping carts, and online accounts, and headers of web-based email; track certain non-Internet related activities taking place on those computers; and transmit nearly all of the monitored information (excluding selected categories of filtered information) to respondent’s remote computer servers,” the FTC concluded. http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/09/sears.shtm
I told my significant other it was time to get some life insurance. He was understandably confused, since our topic of conversation was health insurance and the cost of medical treatment. He has health insurance. I do not. Niether of us can afford to go to the doctor. A simple diagnosis can easily cost $4,000.00 after insurance. A heart attack will cost around $40k, if you have good insurance. I can’t afford health insurance or a doctor… I figure I’d better get some life insurance.
I am all for health care reform. I just don’t want it to be managed by the fed, thank you very much. Govt management of anything has a track record of miserable failure. From parks and wildlife to social security, to public schools, to farming…. the folks on the hill have managed to obliterate potential. Welcome to the machine. Put your life right here in the hands of the machine. It does not compute, and it does not respect.
Posted by: admin Tags: arts, culture, demand shaping, distances of rationalities, economic, entertainment, financial straights, Great Depression, infrastructure, innovation, movie, networks, News, patterns, social movements, sustainable, technology, trends
Relationships are the foundation of art, technology, culture… literally everything we know about anything. The more we seek to isolate and understand the nature of a thing, the more we realize the thing is naturally connected to other things. For example, seeking to understand and utilize atomic energy, we came to realize that it had a relationship with mushroom clouds, cold war, and the end of the world as we know it. The event could not be isolated. The fact is, no event is isolated. This is a basic premise of physical matter which mankind is only now conceding… well, some of us are. There remain throngs of people who still cling to the darkened shadows of the cave, refusing to acknowledge the relationship between shadow and light.
Is there a familiar pattern, here? (Continuity demands that we ask questions for which the answer is known, yet consistently try to tweek and isolate the specifics until we achieve the desired result, or confirm the stated hypothesis.) Studies will show that humans know what humans want to know, deny everything that proves humanity is in denial, and accept only that which affords the promise of continuity of life as we know it.
The arts look at hard times Toledo Blade 
During the Great Depression and economic crunch of the 1970s, movie attendance soared. After the post-Sept. 11 financial straits of the early 2000s, DVDs produced record-setting sales. In lean times Americans, by and large, want to escape their economic woes even if only in two-hour increments. The same can be said of the publics preferences in TV shows during economic downturns. Ratings-minded networks typically provide sunny prime-time programming as alternatives to the dark financial news…
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- www.cluster.eu/category/agenda/page/2/
The noble art of demand shaping
By Ernst. E. Hollander
University of Gaevle, Sweden
ehr@hig.se
There’s an enigmatic tenacity in sustainable innovation processes. I try to explain it by introducing demand shaping as a mirror process to the innovation process. In the literature on innovation it is often noted that it is impossible to plan radical innovation. Studies by economists and business economists alike have, however, mostly analysed those that are radical in a technological or economic sense. I introduce a third type of radicalness - radicalness in the demand shaping. Economists have had a hard time in appreciating this type of radicalness since they are seldom willing to rub shoulders with social anthropologists or sociologists.
Sustainable innovation processes often involve creative demand shaping since they presuppose dialogues that bridge huge distances of rationalities. Cases in point are when new or old social movements must interact with planners of infrastructure or R&D departments of TNC’s in order to find (part) solutions for their sustainability demands. The complexity of the bridge building becomes even greater since the creative path breakers on both sides of the innovative user-producer relation live very precarious lives in their respective organisations. Creativity is seen as threatening by the establishments of the organisations since new patterns of thought often devalue traditional competencies, networks etc.
“Solanka … didn’t run with the crowd. The state couldn’t make you happy … The state ran schools, but could it teach your children to love reading, … Solanka’s book … an account of the shifting attitudes in European history toward the State- vs. - individual problem, was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum and later described as one of the “pre/texts” of what came to be called Thatcherism. Professor Solanka … guiltily conceded …
(But) Thatcherite Conservatism was the counterculture gone wrong: it shared his generation’s mistrust of the institutions of power and used their language of opposition to destroy the old power blocs- to give the power not to the people, whatever that meant, but to a web of fat-cat cronies.”
In Fury by Salman Rushdie
