Privacy and Confidentiality

      With essentially the dissolution of any and all journalistic ethics and the advent of such wonderful creations as "gossip sites", I think it's important to look at the factors that are now contributing to what really should be viewed as the virtual bill of rights being written in our time.  The right to some semblance of privacy is inherently gambled every time we type something that we hope would not be read by any and everyone.  Sites like Facebook, Google, MySpace have been collecting every shred of information for marketing purposes for years.  But so has every other site that you've ever visited in your lifetime.  And guess what, they share all that information with each other as agreed to in terms and services agreements.  The invention and ultimately the acceptance of cookies and preferences, that have for years now been collected in order to manipulate consumer behaviors, has led to the consensus of most to just give up their privacy in order to have convenience and cheaper goods available to them.  Those preferences have been collected for much larger and darker goals that the average citizen is completely unaware of and therefore vulnerable ultimately to the powers that are collecting this information.  Information ultimately is power.
      Look for example at the Supreme Court decision in favor of Citizens United.  An obscure non-profit entity that was looking for an excuse to include corporate donation of campaign finance money, produced a film about Hillary Clinton that they did not care about releasing, and they knew would be impossible to release because of libel.  They only wanted to get before the Supreme Court in order to rattle the first amendment saber to then slide campaign finance money in through the back door.  They used political thinktanks that did extensive polling to come to the conclusion that the American people were more opposed to a woman who might have a scandal attached to her past and would side with the first amendment concerning the "censorship" than they were afraid to succumb to a complete and all encompassing oligarchical fascist state dominated by corporations.
      In order to manipulate political behavior in perpetuity, old school corporate powerhouses used new media resources to research, understand, and ultimately hoodwink longtime foes and gain control over all governing bodies in America with the passage of some ridiculous law concerning "corporations rights" as individual citizens.  This would have been impossible without gathering the kinds of information about technology and political savvy citizens in order to manipulate behaviors effectively.