Kill Process Read Online Free PDF Page A

click to place those ads in front of their fans. Two dollars to sell a forty-dollar ticket is good business all around.
    On the other hand, hyper-personalized advertising has its drawbacks. When a teen researches birth-control or pregnancy or other sensitive topics, and related ads follow her around the Internet, her friends and parents will spot it sooner or later.
    What users hate most is that both Tomo and our corporate partners profit off the information they share: once we sell personalized advertising, and again when that advertising manipulates them into spending money and making decisions they wouldn’t have otherwise.
    People like to believe they own the space inside their own minds, but the reality is it’s all rented away to the highest bidder, bit by bit, every time they’re exposed to another piece of planted information.
    I’m daydreaming while Carl rambles, until he startles me with an unexpected turn of direction.
    “We’re going to market privacy to our users with a new product, PrivacyGuard: Protect yourself and your family .” Carl grins like a cat with two mice. “Not only will we address our number one customer issue, we also create a new source of revenue. Mike, can you explain the details?”
    One of Carl’s marketing flacks gets up. “We eliminate personalized advertising. Zero, zip, zilch. No use of customer data to run ads targeted at them. Of course, that’s only half the picture. Nobody is going to pay for that. We also guarantee their personal data does not appear anywhere on the Internet.”
    I literally feel my eyes squinting as I stare at him. Does he understand how the Internet works? We don’t control it. Nobody controls it.
    He sees me staring and pointedly looks away to scan the rest of the audience. “With our total access to all user data, we can scan the Internet for any occurrences of the user’s personal data. We then opaque that information, so no one can access it.”
    Sarah, the browser technical lead, nods brightly, and it’s obvious she knows what they’re talking about. It takes me a long time to connect the dots to Sarah’s involvement because the idea is so monumentally stupid I must undo everything I know about technology and see it from their perspective.
    Finally it hits me. We introduced our own web browser six months ago, and it’s slowly been winning users, eating away at Avogadro’s market share. Now our browser is responsible for almost a quarter of all web page views. They want to hide the data in our browser.
    “Just because you’re not showing the user their data,” I say, “doesn’t mean it’s removed from the Internet. You’re not removing the data, you’re lying to the user and pretending it’s not there.”
    “It’s better than removing it from one site at a time.” Sarah glares at me even as she keeps her voice light. “We make sure no one can see the private data, regardless of where it is. We find it, we blacklist it, and the Tomo browser won’t display it. We’ve got two dozen patent applications in the works already.”
    “Carl, Daniel, this is insane,” I say. “Please. We’re providing the illusion of privacy, not real help. If someone looks at this, they’ll believe their information is secure, but if anyone switches browsers, it’ll be right there.”
    “Privacy is the feeling of being secure and comfortable,” Carl says. “We can give them that feeling, and that’s what’s important.”
    I take back what I said about Carl being a good guy. Oh, maybe he is, one-on-one, but somehow companies turn employees into monsters who exploit anyone and everyone to make the next billion dollars.
    “You expect customers to pay for this?” I ask. Some people count to ten to calm their emotions. I count off ten ways I could kill Carl. Number nine is an ax to the forehead, which is ridiculous, because axes are unwieldy with one arm, but I like the image of his skull cloven in two. I clench and release my fist.
    Carl nods.