Lubnah

It is not at all exhausting. It's not even on the level of crossword puzzles.

The only thing that gets tiresome is the realization that every company is trying to exhaust you. That the goal itself, is indeed, to wear you down.

Once you realize that's the name of the game, you fight it differently.

Disposable gift cards can be loaded with up to $500, and cost about $5.

If you buy your cards in cash, they're about as private as the security cameras are in whichever convenience store you pay for them in.

Based on what we know about Target's shopper surveillance and behavioral identification efforts being capable of targeting pregnant women with pregnancy products, who didn't even know they were pregnant yet, themselves, even seemingly benign store locations can be pretty lacking in actual privacy.

Between electronic survellance of mobile device identifiers, blue tooth signatures, free wi-fi usage, versus brute force video analysis yeilding facial recognition results for targeted ads on flatscreen monitors as you pass by bus stops, the status of tracking in public spaces is weird, although you really can ditch credit card tracking.

The only problem is, the truly huge companies have assuredly been routing around that idea for years, by diversifying their information channels.

  One could say [...] benefit?

Hardly. Awareness campaigns litter the history of pop culture, and are usually regarded as a nerdy loser's sexual advances toward a prom queen way out of his league.

But more to the point, people are helped by information, and not perversions thereof.

If it were helpful it would neither be called disinformation nor misinformation. It would just be accurate information, applied in a practical manner.

There was a spate of videos that circulated starting around 2012 and later, as sort of a sequel to the bath salts panic, showing horror stories but seem to have been debunked as a eith a hoax campaign, or rare oddities.

Videos still float around, but they seem to have this voyeristic leer to them (like malign scared-straight after school specials) that genuine footage or journalistic coverage usually doesn't carry.

On top of that, there aren't many people actually owning up to being involved in the footage that does surface, and people who claim to have witnessed instances or met individuals affected by it, only seem to be the kind to tell tall tales.

This leads me to wonder if it was largely a media campaign to get in front of a problem, and head it off, before something like its portrayal emerged.