Mark Morford: Comcast Devours Your Life: Privacy shmivacy.

Comcast Devours Your Life: Privacy shmivacy. The cable-TV beast knows more about you than your own mother, and shares it all. Be very creeped out.
By Mark Morford - 9/24/03

Occasionally just for fun and to make yourself slightly ill and if you're for some reason eager to feel all soiled and violated and megacorporate and vituperative and John Ashcroftian, you read the fine print on your cable bill.

Or, rather, 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.

http://usatoday.com/money/media/columnist/lieberman/2002-11-17-comcast_x.htm

Name, home address, e-mail and phone number? Ha. Tip of the draconian iceberg, honey. How about your driver's license number, Social Security number, bank-account number, credit card numbers (note the plural) and "other similar information"? You betcha. They know it all. And they don't mind sharing.

They know how many TVs you have hooked into the "system." They know what you watch, and how frequently, and for how long, and what features you use the most on your remote control and probably what you wear when you watch and how feverishly you wish mountains of screaming genital warts upon the hosts of QVC, what positions you like best when you finally turn off the god-awful narcotic televised swill and get naked on the couch with a Hitachi or a nicely shaped remote control or a willing spouse. Or, rather, they'd sure as hell like to.

Furthermore, Comcast "may combine personally identifiable information [read: private data that's none of their damn business] with personally identifiable information from third parties for the purpose of creating an enhanced database to use in marketing and other activities." Gosh you sweet Comcast lizard execs, I bet if you tried really hard, you could sound slightly more draconian and malicious. Oh, do try.

More? You got it. According to the Privacy Notice, Comcast can, without telling you, share all this personal info with their "affiliates" or the aptly named "others." They can toss your file to their "employees, contractors, agents, outside auditors, professional advisors, service providers, potential business-transaction partners, regulators and franchise authorities." With or without your written consent. With or without giving a crap for anything resembling integrity. Within their legal rights but without the slightest winking nod that they know full well they are violating you every day like a neocon assaults environmental legislation.

Comcast will, like any good inbred corporate citizen, share everything they know about you with the government, if asked. They will share it with lawyers and bill collectors and judges and Homeland Security lackeys. They will use your info in surveys and statistical reports and aggregate pie charts.

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, because hey, who wants to know that just because you watch "Six Feet Under," some corporate hellbitch can use your Social Security number, bank-account number and credit report like poker chips?

Ultimately, the question isn't what the hell they're doing with the information they have. They tell you the answer to that right up front: whatever the hell we want whenever we want and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it ha ha ha enjoy your endless "Cheers" reruns, sucker.

The question really is, how far will they be allowed to go before the national recoil reflex kicks in, à la the "Do Not Call" telemarketing database? How much more data can they possible mine about you and still keep it a secret, when they already know every piece of numerical information you have, every credit card and license and bank account and address and secret code to the lock on your personal diary wherein you delineate just how goddamn creepy corporate leviathans are and how vile they've become and just how much they imperil notions of personal freedom?

Because right now it's a pro-corporate pro-merger antiregulation antiprivacy Ashcroft-sickened USA Patriot Act Big Brother BushCo world, and it's getting worse, it's getting so even 12-year-old girls living in N.Y. housing projects can't download a copy of the last Beyoncé song without the little litigious wasps at the RIAA suing their prepubescent butts for two grand. God bless America.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/11/MN12066.DTL

Comcast and its ilk, they widen the gap between citizen and capitalist machine. 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. Is anything good coming from all this legal data theft? Sure. Here, have a 10 percent discount on Pay-Per-View flicks in your fave genre. Score!

Comcast is not on your side. This is the bottom line. They represent the latest breed of secretive megacorporate info-glutton, a cross between a Homeland Security soul vacuum and Microsoft and that disturbing guy on Friendster who you've never met but who somehow knows your nickname from third grade and wants to buy your underwear.

Of course the good news is, these corporations, like Ashcroft's flying monkeys, they can know nothing of any true substance. This has never changed. Comcast can't touch you in any substantive way, can't possibly genuinely know you or know what you truly value and how you love and with what sort of profound karmic longing you enter the shower every morning. And this fact, of course, drives them insane.

Still, they're trying. Comcast is able to legally suck more data from you than ever before in the history of corporate America, and toss it around more easily and snidely than ever before and tell you all about it not at all, and call it policy. And they are not alone.

And, what's worse, there is no real solution. There is no escape. If you want to be in any way connected to the info-media highway, you are in their database. Or DirecTV's, or AT&T's or Microsoft- Disney-AOL-Exxon-Viacom's. Of this, you need to be aware. You need, right now, to be subtly empowered by this sinister knowledge. If for no other reason that so when they come knocking, you can have a pitchfork ready. Because sure they only have numbers and raw data and credit card statements. But it's damn creepy. And, really, isn't that enough?