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Ramblings

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Feb 14th 2002 9:17pm





How David Coursey Got Slimed By A Big Corporation

from the nice-try dept

David Coursey has an article defending Comcast's actions where they were secretly spying on users. He makes a few mistakes, though. He says the "spying" was really caching, which Comcast clearly said it wasn't. Second, he says that no one cares about what sites you look at and we give away more private info using things like supermarket cards anyway. Sure, but that's by choice. What Comcast did here, was start recording a lot of information from their consumers without giving them any indication that their monitoring system had changed. In fact, it sounds as though, they forced users to install special software by misleading them about the purpose of the software.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Coursey Seeking Controversy?

    identicon
    Dale Gardner, Feb 15th, 2002 @ 2:45pm

    I've actually worked with David in the past as a client, and I always thought he was a pretty smart guy. But it seems like every time I check out Anchor Desk, he's come up with some obnoxious post. He's kissing up for Comcast, he just about got down on his knees and wept over the "loss of innocence" resulting from Mr. Gates recent announcements about how Microsoft was going to get really, really serious about security, and he told Netscape that even though they really were damaged and Microsoft really had broken the law they should just shut the hell up and not rock the boat.

    Unless he's fallen on his head, I don't think he's that goofy - so I'm figuring he's trying to attract readers who will post and flame him (driving up the exposures, making advertising more expensive). That, or there's something in the water. The last guy who had the job started making really ridiculous statements as well.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: Coursey Seeking Controversy?

    identicon
    Walter Bazzini, Feb 16th, 2002 @ 10:07am

    Funny you should mention that, for it reminded me of an Anchor Desk article that got me all worked up ["Advice to AOL: Sit down, shut up" in which he stated that "Tying the browser to the operating system, as Microsoft has done, has made computing easier for all of us."]
    I won't go into why I got all riled for fear of taking this too far off topic, but one has to wonder if Salon's recent, um, decision to allow that glowing piece of rubbish about .NET to fly had something to do with attracting noise.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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