What is more private?
Buying something in person from someone who has no idea who you are, but in whose presence you have to stand while you're completing the transaction for said 'embarassing' item.
or
Buying someting online from a web server at a .com company that knows you only as a string of numbers and bits, but who will also forever remember that you bought said 'embarassing' item.
This comes up because I recently received an email from drugstore.com, promoting itself as the ideal place to buy 'sensitive personal items'. It made me curious about people's sense of shame, as well as privacy. What are we embarassed to buy, and what lengths will we go to anonymize our purchase of which items? It would be an interesting graph -- what 'sensitive' items are we willing to buy in person, which do we require what level of anonymity to buy, which do we need/want to urgently that the potential embarassment doesn't matter, and which do we just not care about?
Too bad. www.plainbrownwrapper.com is taken. And unused.
8:56:19 AM
|