Jason Catlett Quotations

We regard this as information that Intel behaved deceptively.

My initial concept was deplorably vague. All I knew was that the Internet and privacy were on a collision course.

Our usual practice is to talk to the companies concerned before the press,

Responses to direct marketing are dropping in general. More and more people just throw mail away - especially unmarked mail - without opening it.

I think privacy policies may be getting worse. They're getting longer, more difficult to understand, and filled with more loopholes.

Engage has done many good things to protect privacy, but my worry is they are firing the starting gun in the race for the bottom,

The worst actors will be left to use the most sophisticated surveillance techniques as they please.

They all find out that you opened the mail and they get an invisible tracking number, so if you go to a store ... that number is reported to them and they can build that information into a database,

Advertisers are already watching where people go on sites and now they're trying to get details of what is actually bought. Companies holding personal profiles should be required by law to handle the information with extreme care and only use it for the primary authorized purpose.

That's like saying we can't have privacy laws for telephones to protect the privacy of telephone conversations because that might spill over into other areas,

There's an absence of consumer rights and a large number of small actors who are mostly criminals. Dealing with them is like swatting flies one by one, rather than putting up a fence to keep out all the dogs.

A common tactic in direct mail is to disguise the nature of the solicitation and send you something that doesn't indicate what's inside, to make you open the envelope. People aren't opening the 'mystery envelopes' right now.

It shows that we're on a downhill slope. Companies, as they go into bankruptcy or find out more about the legal risks, tend to erect reinforcements around their posteriors. That's bad for the consumer.

It's intolerable that e-mail can be used to silently zap a name tag onto you that might be scanned by a site you visit later. It's like secretly bar-coding people with invisible ink,

If you're taking your laptop to Paris and you have to download your e-mail over an expensive long-distance phone call, you still have to download that stuff even if it's junked before you see it. It's really sweeping the cost under the carpet.

I guess it would be difficult, given the appalling state of Internet privacy, for the FTC to again recommend against federal privacy law,

By synchronizing cookies with name and address from e-mail, registrations, and e-commerce transactions, the merged company would have a surveillance database of Orwellian proportions,

The Internet reduces the cost of gathering information about consumers to practically zero, ... Sending a piece of direct mail to a household costs about one dollar, so no one is going to send you 10,000 pieces of mail, but the cost of contacting you in the online world is virtually zero.