Forgive my crude picture.I could not find what I was looking for on the Web. So, I slapped one quickly together with MS PowerPoint. This is a sample of what a warranty card would like like back in the old days. You fill in the bubble next to your answer. This type of question, you were to only fill in one bubble. They also asked questions like what hobbies do you like and gave a list of fishing/golfing/sewing/knitting/gardening, (on this question you could fill in as many bubbles as you wanted), and they asked if you were married/separated/divorced.
Back in the late 80's I did some keypunching at a consumer company. What I discovered there was that when they sold a product, they sent a warranty/registration card with the product in a box. If a consumer filled out the card and returned it to us, we (I) keyed their personal information - name/address into a computer program and if they were stupid detailed enough to fill out the personal information, I punched that into a computer, also.
Then I ran a program that wrote that data onto a magnetic tape and it was sold (yes, they made money off of this) to a company that used that data to target consumers with magazines/ads - all sorts of things to try to get them to buy more, more, more!
So, that is when I began to only fill out my name on warranty information cards. That way, if a product failed - I would still have my warranty but the company was not able to profit off of my personal information. And, profit they did. We sold millions of products and millions of warranty cards came in. I was paid by how fast I typed. The computer would record my keystrokes and I was paid by the hour/keystroke. I became very efficient.
Anyway, that is sort of like malware on the computer today. These slick little programs infect your computer and monitor what you type - gather that information and try to entice you with ads that fit your lifestyle, income, etc...
If you browse web pages with plants/shrubs/bushes on them - you may start seeing e-mail messages directing you to a seed/plant/shrub distributor.
That is the main reason for spyware/malware. Like it or not. Greed.
3 comments:
Now that we know how it happens, is there any way to keep it from happening?
Yes Grumpy, keep your computer off, ha.
Good question though. I never filled out those cards because I knew what would be coming weeks down the road. So other than running Malwarebytes what can we do to avoid it, if possible?
That's why, when I filled those cards out, I lied a lot. And then I stopped sending those cards in because we were told they were only used for marketing and not as an actual warranty card.
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