I like dead tree books. Those are mine and no one can delete them from my book shelf, as can Amazon and others from your Kindle, etc.

when they become politically uncomfortable.

And it has been done already.

this sort of thing is far more intrusive While government spying affects us vaguely and theoretically Amazon, Google and the rest of them are directly affecting our lives.

Amazon, Newegg, and everyone else we buy from happily sells our buying and reading habits to anyone who asks-- how do we know they won't sell them to someone who has a political reason to know? Imagine a government like North Korea with that data. Imagine a government that sees advantages to North Korea's style while claiming to protect us from the next enemy...

is that the whole purpose seems to be to find out what (the most) readers like and do when they read, so that the industry can replicate exactly what "works" in new books. It's a sort of Bravo Housewives model of publishing that is bound to stifle creativity and limit the general availability of less popular literature. Imagine if James Joyce had been put through the hamburger mill of this kind of market analysis. I truly fear for the future.

You're absolutely right. This is way more frightening than the NSA collecting billions of phone transaction numbers. But people don't seem to care.

They want to produce more formulaic BS

She didn't realize the lengths to which the fascists would go with any public information. Attacked her property, smeared her with their allegations, just flat terrorized an individual for daring to do something democratic society expects citizens to do - be informed and have an opinion on government. What she did was legal, but was silenced by the brownshirts.

Something similar has happened in Oregon, where progressive and liberal Democrats organized a picnic in a public park. The teabaggers saw it and went and broke them up, then they followed each one as they left to drive home, getting their license plate numbers, home addresses and then accessed public data base to get their names, family members, schools their kids attended and where all their relations were. Their meeting was legal, but they were silenced by the brownshirts and not allowed to meet in a public place - that's not a singular event with teabaggers.

This has been used more than once since the Bush administration, when FR publicized the private data, with social security numbes, addresses, phone numbers, etc. of the employees at a bar who refused to serve the Bush twins as they were drunk. By Texas law a bar or restaurant is liable if they serve alcohol to someone impaired. What they did was legal, but they were harrassed and put in danger.

I can see why people are registering as Independents instead of Democrats, because now those records are public. When fascists get tools, they don't use them for public necessity, rather they use them to intimidate, silence and shut out those they consider unfit to be in the public arena.

Yes, we are in danger but the genie was let out of the bottle long ago. The only thing we can do is make sure these types don't get full government power in the presidency. Look at the charges of Christie being petty and venal, like the maniac in N. Korea. They are cut of the same cloth.

We can stand aside and try to ignore what the lack of participation in the workings of government does, or deny the influence of information for profit by corporations for political reasons, but the longer we do, the more danger opposing them will become.

I was disheartened last night watching the full video of JFK when he went to Houston and explained his ideas for government. The crowd was a group of Protestants, who were concerned with his Catholicism. But they did not have objection to his public policy, which was exactly what I have always believed. It's not the same country, half of what I grew up with and was not questioned, is gone by GOP rule since Nixon and Reagan.

I don't know to survive in teabagger theocratic hell. It would be easier to follow the Pope (although that's not full freedom of the mind, either) than what the fascists have in mind for us.

I'll stay in the past, thanks.

until Amazon sees a profit stream opportunity