Vladimir Nuri writes at length about an anonymous system for getting on marketer's lists, so that they can target people who want to buy widgets without having to compile a "dossier" on everyone to determine who might want a widget. The problem with this is that finding a list of widget-buyers is not the only reason marketers collect these "dossiers"... They also do it to sell/rent the information to other marketers, who may be selling Thingamajigs or widget related services or something else entirely -- and the information which is extraneous to the widget marketer is quite useful to the thingamajig vendor or other companies, and selling that information is profitable for the marketing firm. This is probably one reason companies outsource marketing a lot, to take advantage of the databases they have compiled on the consumers. Mr. Nuri's scheme is wonderful for cypherpunks; we only get the junk mail that isn't junk to us (since we're actually interested in widgets or whatever they're selling), and they don't get to compile a "dossier" on us. However it isn't as wonderful for the marketers as he suggests, or they would already be using such a scheme. One of the most important tasks for marketers is how to find new customers, who have never heard of widgets. For this they need information on customers to find who might like a widget; if you have heard of a widget and signed up on Mr. Nuri's list, then that's fine, but for the rest of us who don't even know what one *is* much less whether we want one, the marketers need to do their traditional dossier system. The Net doesn't really change anything here. We've had anonymity through email and telephones for a long time. But *we* have to call *them* in order to get on the anonymous widget consumer's list using Mr. Nuri's system; traditional marketing techniques proactively search out consumers to get them on the list. All that aside, I certainly would prefer it if the world worked in a way to make Mr. Nuri's system practical -- I dislike having "dossiers" on me kept by every marketer in the world, and do not like unsolicited advertising, but I just don't believe that we live in that sort of world. --Bill Ward