Navaho Gunleg

This post on Slashdot got me thinking of something that I’ve been thinking about a couple of years ago.

Who says that websites aren’t already recording your movements?

I mean — earlier in this century I was thinking that, when you are a big corporation, and you have some ‘comments, complaints & suggestions‘ section on the website where people can, well, comment, complain and make suggestions, it is pretty damn valueable to know what people typed into that TEXTAREA but did not submit the information.

Never gave that any thought, until today, reading the above and thinking and — yeh, with all that ‘asynchronous javascript’ — that’s even more easier to implement today. I know Gmail does this — it’s one of the most important ‘features’: Google knows about every email you did not sent.. Every complaint, rant or love-letter you did not send is still in their ‘entropy’ to compressing the whole world into a single system… although you, at the last moment, decided not to send it…

Which makes me wonder… Are there any other web-based forms that actually already do this?

And more importantly — if this happens, is this illegal — or is it possible because of some loop-hole in the system (i.e. can one prevent prosecution with a well-written click-through end-user license-agreement, disclaimers, et cetera?).

I mean — they are my frigging movements — they should be protected by copyright and nobody can steal them just as it is illegal for me to download copyrighted music, right?

Why can’t I copy a CD (or do they use poor techniques in a feeble attempt to prevent me from doing so), while other types of corporations can frigging record my intellectual property? And not only websites — what about biometric systems depending on a record of your physical information. I don’t know, but being reduced to an insignificant set of parameters kind-a feels like rape. It’s disrespectfull and it introduces more problems than they solve.

There must be a way to sue the companies that do this, for just as an excessive amount of damage done, like the MPAA and RIAA are inflating the numbers of piracy. Just like them, I should be able to be a rich man too, without actually doing any real work or producing anything.

(On that note — I just love this whole ‘Try Before You Buy‘ concept that we have on the Internet these days. You can download whatever crap you might want to buy before actually wasting your hard-earned money on a piece of shit film or whatever. There are plenty of things that I wouldn’t have bought if I didn’t first got it from somewhere else. There’s nothing wrong with that. The media only too well realises that 99% of their output is plain and utter crap and don’t frigging want you to try — and have to resort to cheap marketing ploys because you’d never even be remotely interested in it.

If only the record- and movie industry had been a little more honest in the past — we could be looking at a grand world right now without the wasted cash on (flawed-by-design) DRM restrictions and, more importantly, we could’ve had quality productions. I mean — they are in the entertainment-business and I find those guys practices hardly entertaining. In that respect, the Internet really is serving society — it actually does help the people prevent them from wasting their precious cash on artificially over-priced garbage. But again, I digress….)

I just don’t like the idea of keeping tabs on where my cursor goes, the keys that I touch or what my eyes are balling, merely for creating more ‘efficient’ (read: deceiving) marketing ploys.