Wading through lame crap, plus on-topic privacy stuff

[Don <don@cs.byu.edu>]

>   Neither dropping nuclear weapons on Japanese cities nor an invasion 
>   of Japan was necessary to secure surrender of the Japanese government. 

Doesn't anyone bother to delete cpunks from the CC before sending this off
topic stuff? And since I know it's coming, please refrain from trying to
relate it to anything relevant here with some kind of japan-crypto or
wrongful governmental action ObCrypto's. What I had for lunch is just as
irrelevant, but that doesn't mean it becomes relevant if I can somehow
involve encryption.


Dangit, wheres my procmail. Does anyone use gnus for this list? I think
I need a scoring system.


Now for the on-topic stuff. Looking through my mail yesterday, noticed a
credit card application from BofA. Despite the fact that they didn't want
to give me a card three years ago, they have offered a student card to me.
I figured that it was a lucky guess, them knowing I'm a student again. Then
I noticed they were kind enough to fill in my school ("Main Campus" too) into
the appropriate blank. Now, that's either a really good guess, or else they've
been out looking me up. I'm currently writing a letter to BofA telling them
they can kiss my rear if they're going to go around keeping tabs on me. They
should at least be more careful about letting me on to them.

This got me interested in which companies keep track of what information. I'm
now going to write to my other credit companies and ask something like:

   I am interested in knowing what information your company keeps track of    
   which is not directly related to my credit history, my balance, and my   
   current address. For example, do you maintain or seek out any of the 
   following information:

   Change in Marital Status that don't relate to credit account
   change or loss of employment
   spending habits, ie, types of goods, dollar amounts and locations,
     for any purpose
   credit or bank accounts with other companies, for any purpose

Can anyone suggest anything else to ask about? I know, for example, that some
companies keep track of spending so as to be able to call you up if you, for
example, start buying large numbers of cars in asia. Or maybe they have a red
flag that goes up if you start to max out all your other credit cards or
something. But I've run out of things that I think they're keeping track of
that they don't need to. I suppose DNA samples is probably still a bit away.

Don