At 09:24 AM 5/27/96 -0500, Mike McNally wrote:

What if I just *see* your couch, and then back in my garage I use my couch replicator to make a couch just like yours, complete with fuzzballs and loose change between the cushions? Now I have your couch, in a sense. Are you still upset?

Watch and act. This doesn't bother me. What specifically bothers me is the reselling of information that I chose to reveal for a specific transaction, most especially when I did so with an assumption of privacy. I'm happy to provide businesses with the info they need to see that I'm not going to stiff them on a sale. I am _very_ unhappy that some of them then turn around and sell that info to others, and doubly so when what gets passed on is wrong.

When I walked off with your blood chemistry data, did you lose the use of it for your future purposes?

What I've lost here is privacy, something which does have monetary value to me. [example of info gleanable by my reading/posting to Cypherpunks and other sources out there for the world to see]

What do you propose as to the obligations I should have to you as regards the disposition of this information? For example, what if I receive a

Things like that don't bother me, either. If I really didn't want to be associated with Cypherpunks that way, I could do things to protect my identity. On the other hand, say I sign up for a mailing list that charges a subscription fee, like Extropians. I would feel no ground for complaint if someone markets a list of Extropian subscribers - but I'd feel much ground for complaint if I learned the list owner were selling credit histories gathered during the subscription process. (Unless, of course, I assent to a clause to the effect that the list owner can do anything he wants with my credit info, as opposed to the specific purpose of getting payment for the list.) -- Bruce Baugh bruce@aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce