Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

It's how it's always been, always.

Many here may be too young to remember when many consumer products came with a "product registration" card. This was basically a postcard that asked for all sorts of information, such as your name, address, phone number, birthdate, sex, SSN, marital status, annual income, interests, other products owned, whether you own or rent your home, etc.

People willingly filled these out and sent them in. All the info went into databases that were merged with other sources and traded around various marketing agencies on 9-track tape reels. Advertisers could get mailing lists segmented by age, sex, income level, geographical region or specific zip codes, etc. for their campaigns.

It's all much more pervasive and invisible now, but it's basically what has always been done.

View on HN

> It's all much more pervasive and invisible now, but it's basically what has always been done.

Basically is doing a lot of work here, the level and degree of how much data is vacuumed, processed, and used for targeting nowadays is orders of magnitude of difference from these primitive ways.

A tent and a house are basically the same: a shelter.

Right, the pervasivenes today is much higher. But marketers/advertisers have always hoovered up and exploited as much information as was technically possible. That attitude isn't new.

Another thing that is absolutely new is the vast number of people using this data for things other than ads/marketing. The data on registration cards was never used to decide if you get a job or not, or how much you pay for a hotel room vs the next person, or how long you wait on hold when you call a customer service line, or how much your insurance rates go up, or whether or not you're a suspect in a criminal investigation, or if you get custody of your child in a divorce proceeding. The amount of things our data ends up being used for is on a scale that simply was not possible when people started filling out product registration forms.

For better or worse, those use cases are at least somewhat legitimate. Marketing is purely malicious.

I can't recall a time where I or anyone I knew filled those out and sent them in. I realize this is anecdotal but it a lot easier to not mail in a form than to try to find the opt-out option in some computer OS.

> It's how it's always been, always.

I don't know, I don't think sending in product registration cards could/would often result in your bank account being drained...

> It's all much more pervasive and invisible now, but it's basically what has always been done.

So you admit it is far worse today than it was before? But the second half of your sentence seeks to disingenuously pretend that it has "always" been bad.

I can be sick with a cold or I can have stage-four brain cancer. People have "always" been sick but one is serious (terminal cancer) one is not (a non persistent cold).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com