Clicking Away Your Soul

This video is pretty horrific. It's also somewhat inaccurate--in order to log in and reach the stage where you're faced with that privacy statement, you have to register to get the *dealer* information. But it's still pretty bad when the government is declaring that it *owns the system* while a person is logged in and can share any and all information on said system with anyone it likes.

Car dealerships would be bad enough, but most car loans go through banks and other financial institutions, and they are people who are quite likely to want to register on sites like these, making all of your personal information de jure property of the government.

Oh, I agree that this is likely just sloppy wording and won't ever amount to anything, but it's another sign of just how far over the hill into tyranny this country is. Tyrants and scam artists rely on a lot of the same tricks and the Big Lie is one of them. Think they won't enforce things like this given the chance? They will. People in power who think they're doing things "for your own good" have shown time and time again that they have NO scruples about doing WHATEVER they can do to "get the job done" as long as they can get away with it, and maybe not even then. Heck, the wayward cop who breaks the rules to get his man is as much a cultural icon as the debonair rogue or the cowboy.

Sure, we cheer for cops who find the rules tiresome when they're up against a murderer or rapist or someone genuinely evil. But honest citizens must remember that there are people out there who consider you *genuinely evil* if you are in favor of legal abortions or insist that you have a right to keep your hard-earned cash when someone else "needs" it. Those "tiresome" rules exist for a very good reason and a principled person understands that and accepts them as necessary. If you want a cultural icon, the scrupulous cop would be a MUCH better choice.

Glenn Beck's indulgence in scare-mongering masks a much bigger and scarier issue that could swallow us all whole.

Update: Here is a link that takes you to the privacy policy Beck quoted.