I'm not sure that would benefit consumers greatly, since many are having a hard time already filling out forms when purchasing stuff. Also, the more forms there are, the more points of exploitation there will be as well.

Perhaps merchants should be forced to inform by email or preferably by snail mail when and why they share information, much like is done when companies ask for a credit report on you (at least where I live).

Being married (yes I am!) falls in the same category as having friends, being a manager...etc - they are relations that you have, not methods that you apply. That's where all the books have it wrong suggestion that there are techniques to apply instead of being authentic.

There are no scripts involved in this. As much as it may disturb basement-dwellers, exercising your Swedish freedom of information involves showing up at the specific public office/gov't branch/etc yourself.

You have to show up at the court in person and ask to see any documents pertaining to specific IP-addresses. The court is not obliged to prepare lists or in any other way format the data; they will just hand out the entire court document itself for you to sift through. The work is also expected to be "reasonable", which is why you just can't show up with 1000 ip-addresses every day.

The general idea behind the Swedish freedom of information is that you know what you're looking for, not that you're scanning everything in order to find something interesting. This of course makes it hard to apply in cases like IPRED where you may not be informed that you are under investigation until after a whole month.

And when they make it illegal to use VPNs and start enforcing it ?

The fuss is about that you shouldn't have to use proxies in order not to be monitored by a corporation playing cops.

[Citation needed]

Perhaps I am, but I believe that you're reading too much into the public release media material, which is a very watered-down version of the findings of the actual study.

Do you have any clue what's involved in doing scientific research, especially involving a large study such as the one in question (ALSPAC), involving 14000 children and their parents ? It sounds like you are questioning the scientific methods used in the study, which so far has resulted in over 300 peer-review academic papers, so it would be interesting to know what you base this on.

Or is this just a knee-jerk reaction to something that's not obvious to you ?

I'm not saying that you're out of your depth here, but I'll wager that you are.

> I don't think that researchers understand the difference between causation and correlation.

Why is that ? Have you ever undertaken studies to become a researcher, perhaps at PhD or post-doc levels ? If you did and still believe this, then you should ask for your money back. Most such programs involve quite extensive theory behind how to calculate statistical association and correlation. Do you actually know anything on how this study was performed and how its findings was analyzed ?

Perhaps you do, but the tone of your comment leads me to think that you have no idea and just think the summary sounded too far-fetching for your liking.