If you're reading this, you have probably been to our site and seen that we have decided to shut PinfoB down indefinitely. This was not a decision we came to lightly and hate that we may have let down those who shared our vision enough to join us and take a stand against the machine. 

First, I want to reiterate that if you were a member and provided information, rest assured it has been deleted and cannot be shared with anyone. Everyone who had reached their cashout level will automatically receive a check for their full balance to the address you provided us.

We started on this journey with the goal of creating a platform where we could all begin to take back control of our personal and consumer information. We worked tirelessly to make that happen for our members and to make them as much money as possible. Some made a pretty good amount while some made nothing. 

At the end of the day, we did our best and were pleasantly surprised as well as encouraged to see how many people felt the same way we did. Unfortunately, a lasting success requires the perfect timing of a number of factors including more than a little luck.  If we had other viable options to continue the fight please believe we would.

We had a great team and will move on to the next thing. On behalf of all of us, we want to thank all of our supporters and apologize to our members. 

If you have any questions please email:

Members: [email protected]

Customers: [email protected]

Media: [email protected]

_________________________________________

Sincerely,

Our Beta is going great. I love getting feedback from members on what they like about the site, want to see in the future, and even bugs we didn't know existed! As you can see from the graph, membership is growing fast which is fantastic. 

If you haven't already been to the site www.pinfob.com, check it out and stop by our facebook page as well. Our page (www.facebook.com/pinfob) mostly has great ways for you to save/make money (afterall that's what we do for you!) and information on online privacy. 

So Apple is moving our lives to the cloud? Two things come to mind reading about how this will work. First, I think Awesome! Then, I think, well what are they doing with all of that information?

Let's face it, there is something super "the future is now" about having all of your information available across almost any device you own wherever you are. Lots of people have been working towards that using a variety of products from Google, etc. to get entirely into the cloud, but ol' Jobsy and Apple making it significantly easier in one graceful fel Apple swoop. I'm not surprised. iCloud has been on the horizon for a while, but in true Apple form, it looks like it's being implemented with high style and big fanfare. 

Looking past the glitz and wow factor though, I can't help but think about how much information this will put in the hands of Apple. There are so many what if's my brain starts to tremble at the thought. Conspiracy theorists around the world are probably more giddy today than the Apple fan boys. To date it seems like the security and dependability of the cloud has been pretty well defended with solid logic and facts. Even if that's true, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, I can't help but wonder things like (1) what if they used that info on us, (2) what if something happened to the info, and (3) what if they sold that info.

Let's look at those. 

1 - what's the worst that could happen if they did use the info to market better to us? The decisions in the end are are still ours to make. Afterall, they are giving the service to us free (if you don't count the arm and leg you had to give for the devices) in return for us using their equipment and keeping our precious info with them. 

2 - Even if something happens to the magical fields of cloud servers that Apple will no doubt employ the latest and greatest security measures for, there is still a possibility that a meteor could smash down on the buildings, a tornado could whip through, or a tsunami could wash it all away, right? Definitely. So do we not use it because of that? Nope. Look, just because they're going to let us access all of our information from all sorts of places, doesn't mean that we can just give up the responsibility of keeping backups of our own. This is a lesson that could be applied to a lot of new tech. It's great, use it, but you are responsible for you.

3 - here's the big one. I haven't seen any terms and conditions or privacy policies, but no matter how benign they may seem now, I'm sure they have something in there that lets them change the rules whenever they want. The odds are against them doing wholesale schilling of lists of millions, but there are many other ways to make money from our info than that. Just ask Facebook and Twitter who rake in billions by looking at the information we have on their servers. To be honest, this is what worries me the most. I don't think any axe murderers are going to show up at my door with info they got from Apple; I'm much more concerned about someone else making so much money off me without paying me. I guess, if I don't like it, I don't have to buy their products, but that doesn't seem like the friendliest way to do things. Why don't they just let us decide what of it is available to advertisers and cut us in on the money they make from it? 

The quick answer is no. Why ask the question? Well, remember when the internet was first getting popular? It was kind of small and most of us wondered what everyone was doing on it. What was going on in those chat rooms? That wasn’t a long time. As we all know, it quickly grew exponentially as we started to realize there was no end to what could be uploaded, downloaded, read, seen, and done on the internet. The age of information was legit. You could find out anything about anything in moments. Am I the only one laughing (though not without some nostalgia) at the thought of how we use to go to an actual hard copy encyclopedia to find out about something? Remember when they put Brittanica on a set of a gillion disks? In what felt like a week, the online world went from weirdos in their underwear to everyone but a few weirdos who still don’t use it. The amount of information was ridiculous. Scams, viruses, and content farms grew like plagues. People learned how to make websites and all of a sudden it was a little too big. You couldn’t trust it. It was a Frankenstein and we were losing control.

Enter the personalization. Google started making real strides in customizing our results. Thanks to effective use of “cookies” ads and other information could be targeted. MySpace and Facebook started letting us share the internet with our friends. What one person sees for Google results is totally different than what someone else sees. As you go from one site to another, the ad networks look at where you’ve been, what you’ve searched and in a fraction of a second make a huge number of assumptions about you to display things they think you will like. These assumptions change the content you see in a number of places. Some are arguing that personalization is going or already gone in a bad direction. The fear now, instead of too much information, is that we will be kept from seeing things that the sites assume we won’t be interested in. I would have to agree that no one can accurately assume or guess everything about me. If reality is what we perceive it to be, and our perception is based on what we see around us, then will our sense of the world be skewed based on what Google assumes we like? Are the machines about to get smarter than us?

Slow down. This could be true if we were all complete idiots with no ability to think for ourselves. Granted, there are plenty of those out there and they may be screwed, but lets face it, those people are the sheep. For the rest of us, we can still decide to challenge ourselves. We can still seek out information. We can choose to visit sites (real and online) that take us out of our comfort zone. We can still listen in to what the other side is saying. We can engage with all kinds of people. We are doing these things and don’t have to stop.

As of the 10th of this month the Beta version of PinfoB is live!  

What is PinfoB? Well, it is an acronym for "Personal Info Broker", but let me start from the beginning...I have a marginally unique last name (Labadie) which is often misspelled.  One day, while sifting through the huge amount of junk mail I receive, I saw some familiar misspellings.  I eventually connected the dots and realized that several of the accounts I had (like utilities and magazines) were unabashedly selling my information to people who were sending me this junk mail. Okay.  I can live with the idea that marketing is an integral part of our society here in the good ole US of A.  Afterall, that's how so many of the websites we visit are free, why Facebook is still free, and why Google can offer us all so many killer products.  

But, what about the rest of it? Is junkmail powering some killer social network we don't know about?  Does the spam mail that fills our inboxes fund key parts of the internet? No. It just doesn't. It's like how all the creatures have a purpose in the world but you can't quite see how mosquitoes and ticks fit in.  Worst of all, this isn't even how the advertisers want to be spending their money! There is an old saying in marketing that goes "you're always wasting half of your marketing dollars, you just never know which half."  I don't think it has to be that way. 

So, back to the story.  Once I realized my information was being bought and sold, I did a little digging to see just how much it was worth and how many transactions were happening.  I was shocked. The numbers vary widely, but the overall industry just in direct marketing (people buying your info and sending you something directly) is $10,000,000,000.00 each year. Yea, that's Billion - with a B.

How are they getting your info, you ask?  Well, that is a long story best told in its own post, but suffice it to say pretty much everywhere all the time.  They place cookies on your browser when you're online, that grocery store club card, almost every website you've ever signed up for, your utility companies, the government. The list goes on and on. These are all just "middle-men". What companies and advertisers want is a direct line of communication with we the consumers. That's why they love when you go to their facebook page and comment or post pics with their logo or product.