Celtic_Kerr said:
TO be honest I see this in a very basic point of view. Sony, Bill Gates, Me, the homeless man on the corner, you, the weird looking man in the country next to mine, everyone has the right to ASK for something or even DEMAND something. However, the person they make the demands of can always say "NO".
Facebook asks for your personal info. If you say no, then you don't post it. If you do post it, then if your account gets hacked and everyone has your personal info, its your fault for putting it on the internet.
My future potential landlord can ASK me for post dated cheques for every month of the rent upon signature of the lease. But I can say no, and he cannot force me as per the regie de logement of Quebec.
Sure, you can demand all you want, it's not a crime. But if someone doens't want to, it is within their right as a person.
I can walk up to you tomorrow and say "Dude, can you give me your car? I'm not gonna pay you for it" and if you give it to me, then you do. Sure outside people will say "He must have tricked him, how dare he not offer the guy anything for the car" rather than "Well, it's a valid deal. He asked for the car, he said he wasn't going to pay, and he got it... Dude shouldn't have given his car away"
Hmm, I don't think you really see what my problem with this is. Yes, I agree that if you put your information directly into the public domain, you are taking a known risk and if people exploit it, then that's sort of your fault.
But if you give your information to one company, and ostensibly only to that company, they shouldn't have the rights to sell or give away that information, because if that isn't directly the point of the service you're getting, it may indeed concern private details that you don't want out there. (It's even more likely that it will, if there's a "required field" of personal information that you must enter in order to join, after buying the product - that kind of trick is just disgusting.)
You see, once information goes from one company to another, it may as well go public for all the potential ways it can leak out or get sent to someone else. You never know if there's an information firm out there that gathers as much of this leaked data as it can then sells it to who-knows-who, or publishes it.
It's not so much that there WILL be a slippery slope of private data movement issues, it's that such transfers increase the risk that this will be the case, and with the ordinary consumer in the firing line, I believe that's more than enough reason to be against what Sony has done here.
I think it's worthy of note, too, that while some conscious consumers (myself included) read the terms of agreement properly and consider declining before clicking "yes" on them, they are deliberately designed to be unreadable and boring to the layman so they fall for whatever terms the company having it written wants. Yes, being stupid in this way means you're going to run into problems. But if much of the consumer population falls for that kind of thing, I'd rather a kinder approach by corporations like Sony.
Even if people have to (legally) protest and boycott to earn it, there needs to be an understanding and a respectful approach towards the lowest common denominators of human society. Letting companies prey on the stupid, the mentally ill, the drunk, the drugged, and the stressed (in other words, the weak) isn't justice, it's laziness.
). They're trying to protect their products at the expensive of personal freedom, not cool.
