"Dear Santa" letter from a vigilant kid

Dear Santa,

I cannot send you my Christmas letter because the letter will have a lot of my personal data aka personally identifiable information (PII) data. Due to privacy laws and potential stalkers, my parents forbade me to send you a letter or an email. With the various cybersecurity issues, I am not sure if my email will end up in the wrong hands and my daddy, mommy, brother, sister and I may get socially engineered and phished.

Since I still believe in you, here is a compromise. I will share my Amazon wish list and you can use it to send me toys. It needs to be magically because my parents forbade me to share my address with you. I noticed that now Amazon recommends items that I can add to my Amazon wish list. I wonder if Amazon is learning my behavior on Amazon.com. Doesn't that compromise my privacy? Mommy and Daddy tell me privacy laws are here to protect me but I am not sure if websites like Amazon.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com should use my data to make money.

Nevertheless, please send me your email address and I will share my Amazon wish list.

Merry Christmas Santa,

Your Friend

P.S.  My parents forbade me to share my name with you.

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NOTE: I used the picture from https://spaceshipsandlaserbeams.com/20-free-printable-letters-to-santa/.

Are you for real?

For the last couple of weeks, if you ever ran into me, you  would notice that I am usually fidgeting with iPhIone.   Either I must be checking my email, tweeting or simply "four-squaring". Four-squaring?  What is four-squaring?  Well I just coined the term on this blog entry.   If you ever hear the word "four-square" then you can attribute it to this blog entry.  According to "moi", four-squaring is a term that references to a person who is advertising his or her existence on the foursquare mobile app.  Foursquare lets you tell the world that you are in a specific store.  If you use the app alot then you end up earning foursquare badges..  Sounds alot fun right?  Actually I thought I was advertising my shopping trends and my daily routine to the world.  Vendors are now offering special coupons via foursquare to visit their stores.  It sounds like alot fun for the user...BUZZ! You are wrong!  It's sounds like $$$ for the vendor since it is another marketing channel and another data point to consider in their marketing strategy.  In closing I would say,

• 4^2 = $$$$$ for the vendors
• 4^2 = no privacy for the user + meaningless badges.