by Tom Blair
Columnist

They are always asking for your e-mail address, especially this time of the year when you’re making a lot of purchases. They like to have your e-mail address so they can keep sending you garbage e-mail all year long.

I recently bought a new computer from Best Buy and they asked for my e-mail address. I told them I really didn’t want to give it to them, but I was assured I wouldn’t be sent garbage-sale e-mails…WRONG! I rarely turn on my computer without having some SPAM mail from Best Buy.

I have sent 5 emails trying to get it stopped and as I write this column I am playing Facebook tag with some Best Buy guy who says it should be simple. Yeah, right!

I know a businessman who had a nice two-seater, gas engine go-cart in the front of his store one time. (Nice one too.) You just had to fill out a little piece of paper with your name, age, e-mail address, what your favorite activities were and YOU might WIN that go-cart.

When I asked him about the marketing behind it, he said a company was doing it for him and the information from it, and the information the company gets is broken down and sold to various other companies and the e-mail address could be bought and sold many times to make enough money to buy a LOT of go carts.

I bought a new HP printer and had to register it on line to be able to get it working and of course you have to enter your e-mail address to complete the registration. Now I get all kinds of crap from HP on buying print cartridges, programs to make cards and every promotion I never wanted to get involved in.

You know that every time you enter your e-mail address on a form on line… some company gets it and when you are surfing the net looking at insurance, cars, medicine etc… you are leaving tracks where you go and there are little cookies being placed in your computer to keep track of you and what you are looking for and reporting it to big brothers everywhere.

Clean out your cookies, run the spyware and give em a false e-mail address and remember…This isn’t fiction by George… this IS 1984, just like Orwell said in 1949.

Tom “Road” Blair

Website: www.tomroadblair.com