Saturday, August 01, 2009

"Cars for Clunkers": Warning! Do not log in to cars.gov!

I admit that I am incredibly wary of anything the government says or does. I especially believe that the bunch in charge in DC now do not consider the Constitution as binding on them or any obstacle to what they want to do to this country. They will use the Constitution when it is convenient for them or suits their purposes, but they will ignore vast sections of it when it opposes them. I offer as exhibit A their treatment of the Second Amendment. Heck, I'll even give you exhibit B with their treatment of the First Amendment free speech rights when that speech is conservative in content and nature.

This video is exhibit C today. Now, you may think Glen Beck is some far-right crackpot conspiracy theorist goofball, but in this video he quotes directly from the cars.gov website privacy notice which you have to agree to before you can use the site. Pay close attention to that part of the video:


Now do you really want to use that "Cash for Clunkers" program and give up all your computer privacy in perpetuity to the federal government and anyone they think needs what you have on your computer?

Not this little gray duck.

8/4 UPDATE: Read a note discussing this clip from a guy who is a Fedgov computer security analyst, and said this is standard for any federal computer system, and it's no big deal. No big deal. No big deal? You give the government permission to take any file they want to out of your computer, and to install any monitoring software they want to into your computer, and it's no big deal?

Sorry, I personally think it's a big deal.

8/12 UPDATE: It seems that the text of the Terms of Use have now been changed to remove the offending statements. If it was just Standard Operating Procedure, why the change? The cynic in me says "Now they'll just take it over without your permission".

No comments: