Dear Commercial Enterprises on the Internet:
I very often go to sites where I’m expected to just allow cookies, regardless of who sets them or what they contain. The tracking of visitors to your websites is an inappropriate invasion of individual privacy. It is therefore immoral, unethical, and probably fattening (at least to your wallets at my expense).
I find that, in many cases, if I want to find out information about an area I’m expected to give you my name and address (and sometimes phone number) before I can access the information. VERIZON! TAKE NOTE: you don’t need my name and address. Your thinly veiled attempt to gather personal information is repulsive to me. It’s enough to know that I’m within 20 miles of a particular target location.
I continually get advertisements from businesses. Some of them I do business with, some of them I don’t. In most cases I go looking for a way to opt out of the incessant barrage of emails only to find out that there is NO WAY that I can stop them. I DON’T NEED NOOK or KINDLE or whatever your lousy ebook reader is called. I am perfectly capable of turning pages. And, when all else fails, can read most ebook formats on my computer with ease. I also don’t need to be given an “early upgrade” by Verizon so that you can get rid of the lousy 3G garbage that you weren’t able to sell in the last year, in advance of your coming out with a lousy 4G series of phones.
There are times when I’m disgusted. There are many advantages to being able to investigate a business on the Internet: the ability to look up products and prices comes readily to mind. Also the ability to locate outlets or to determine availability of products. But some businesses go WAY too far, to the point where I long for the time when business were forbidden to be on the internet.
Is there ANY ethics in business? No, not that I’ve seen.
