A while back a sister contacted me and requested I remove some comments she had left on this blog back when I first started it. She was going stealth and didn’t want Google popping her name up as appearing on a site with Transsexual in its title.
No problem I did a search on her name and deleted all her comments.
Over the weekend she contacted me again and said that Google was still showing her name linked to that post, would I change or delete the post.
I refused.
Why? Because it would change nothing with Google. Google is one big tracking machine. I wish I could exert more influence over it, if I could I’d start pulling in 10,000 hits per day and start running ads.
But as it is, having both Women and Transsexual in the title was sort of a bit of serendipity that puts this blog fairly high in priority on searches that combine both words.
On the other hand this woman believes that simply blasting her presence from TS/TG sites will keep employers from discovering her past.
Even those transkids whose parents are supporting their transition in early childhood have a past.
Birth Certificates, Social Security numbers, school records.
If you transition in adulthood the credit card companies and all the data vacuums will never ever forget you. My partner is over 14 years post-op, has changed addresses several times as well as all her papers.
She still gets credit card and other offers in her old name.
There is no privacy in a Total Information Awareness society.
This person said she wasn concerned about a CIA level investigation, but I’m not talking about that, either.
I’m talking about your basic hundred dollar background check they give for anyone being offered any sort of management position.
During this economic down turn negative credit reports have become grounds for turning down job applicants.
All this really sucks.
It also sucks to be afraid you will be turned down for a job because of being TS/TG.
This is reason to support an inclusive ENDA.
From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/privacy-dead-4-government-and-private-entities-conspiring-track-everything-you-do
The police-corporate surveillance “complex” is being consolidated, drawing ever-closer corporate tracking and government surveillance.
By David Rosen
September 10, 2012
Americans’ personal privacy is being crushed by the rise of a four-headed corporate-state surveillance system. The four “heads” are: federal government agencies; state and local law enforcement entities; telecoms, web sites & Internet “apps” companies; and private data aggregators (sometimes referred to as commercial data warehouses).
Conventional analysis treats these four domains of data gathering as separate and distinct; government agencies focus on security issues and corporate entities are concerned with commerce. Some overlap can be expected as, for example, in case of a terrorist attack or an online banking fraud. In both cases, an actual crime occurred.
But what happens when the boundary separating or restricting corporate-state collaboration, e.g., an exceptional crime-fighting incident, erodes and becomes the taken-for-granted operating environment, the new normal? Perhaps most troubling, what happens when the traditional safeguards offered by “watchdog” courts or regulatory organizations no longer seem to matter? What does it say that the entities designed to protect personal privacy rights seem to have either been effectively “captured” or become toothless tigers?
In President Eisenhower’s legendary 1960 farewell address, he warned of the potential power of the military-industrial complex. Ike’s 20th century formulation represented the intertwining of the U.S. military and private contractors to achieve two complementary goals. First, it sought to help corporations make guaranteed, cost-plus profits and to provide glide-path retirement programs for the military brass. Second, it sought to influence Congress and thus shape foreign policy, helping fulfill the then just-emerging global imperialist strategy.
Today’s corporate-state surveillance complex demonstrates a comparable intertwining of U.S. policing forces and private companies in the monitoring of domestic life. It is being implemented thanks to the technology fruits of a half-century of the military-industrial complex. The Defense Department created the Internet and what it can do in Yemen it can do in Oakland. The global war on terrorism is coming home!
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/privacy-dead-4-government-and-private-entities-conspiring-track-everything-you-do
