Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero - Latest Comments in What is Podshow doing with your kids?

Re: What is Podshow doing with your kids?

Bryce Moore — Tue, 29 May 2007 11:00:57 -0000

Podshow better be careful, lest they have a civil-rights complaint lodged against them for this. If this was a job application, there would be screaming from the rooftops for melding personally identifying information to any question on race.

The rest of it is just... scary. Privacy policies be damned -- they can and are changed at a whim to suit the needs of the company, with pretty much no recourse for information gathered before the changes.

There are advertisers and sales slugs out there that would drool all over themselves to the point of needing a mop to have this much marketing information tied to a physical address.

What's scarier than the questions asked here is the fact that most people WILL give away this information for that infinitesimally small chance to win a trinket of some kind.

Re: What is Podshow doing with your kids?

Steve — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:23:13 -0000

Yeah, that kind of skeeved me out also. I just put down 0 kids for it, because I wasn't particularly comfortable divulging that information either.

I understand (though it took some explaining from Jersey Todd and Jen from Bucket) that they need the mailing information to send you prizes, and I guess that's OK. But that really needs to have a big wall between that and the survey information.

A bigger question, though, is demographic information really useful at all? You might get geographic information if you're mailing stuff to people, but I can't once remember an instance where I put anything other that "Less than $25,000" or "$250,000 or more" on any survey I've taken. So if everyone lies on the demographic information, doesn't that invalidate it?

Re: What is Podshow doing with your kids?

Nico — Tue, 29 May 2007 00:54:48 -0000

Spltting one racial/ethnic background sounds not only weird but even offensive.

Re: What is Podshow doing with your kids?

Zack "The Mothman" Daggy — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:04:03 -0000

It's probably to find out if adds targeted to parents are relevant. Adds for diapers, baby food, etc.