I pay Bellsouth/AT&T for DSL service and part of that service is an email address. It was bad enough that they farmed it out to Yahoo! so they didn’t have to manage the mail server and website.

But now I have to accept Yahoo! scanning my email, messing with my address books, and who knows what’s next.

Sure, I can use POP and get my mail off the server and have a second address book in another mail tool.

But Yahoo! is still scanning my email, in or out. I have contacts listed for remote access using the web when traveling and not at my main computer that holds all my mail.

I did see it reported somewhere that the Postal Service now photographs all 1st class stuff (recording sender and recipient addresses), though. But I don’t think they can see thru envelopes, at least not yet.

It’s kinda like me paying with cash instead of checks…less of a trail. It is not up to me to ensure that workmen pay their taxes on the trivial amounts I expend for their help. No credit cards at supermarkets either, thus no data mining.

Ferdinand and Isabella mandated that Spanish Jews convert to Catholicism or leave Spain without their assets. So Jews sewed jewels into their clothes and left. Others nominally converted….recent archeology found Jewish relics in New Mexico that date to the early 1500s!

I need to get Outlook 2000 up and running again. It lives on my hard drive, and Yahoo/Google don’t get their cotton-pickin’ fingers into my address OR my folders (I think….)

I got the creepy Yahoo message too. They should have said, “Do you want us to clean out your contact list?” instead of just breaking in and doing it.

“What you you expect for a free service?”

If I didn’t know better, I would take offense :-).

“On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:

A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top-secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).

Seriously.

[Obama’s] “prospect” is now a reality: “actual abuse” – including “listening in on people’s phone calls” and “inappropriately reading people’s e-mails” – occurs daily. In early 2012, “actual abuse” was occurring at the rate of ten “incidents” a day – an “incident” is a ‘term of art’ that can cover hundreds of violations of thousands or even millions of citizens.”