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France Gone Weird

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Clarissa

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France keeps coming up with weird ideas on how to tax everybody into the ground:

“Personal data are the fuel of the digital economy,” Edouard Geffray, the agency’s secretary general, told the French version of the online magazine Slate. “Given that, it would seem like a natural idea to envision taxing the use of them.”

While business plans built on mining consumers’ personal information from the Internet are proliferating, so are concerns about the use of the data. . . Mr. Colin said the main goal of his tax plan would be to reward companies for providing their customers with useful information, while penalizing those that did not do so.

Taxation as means of social control is a very slippery slope. It might seem like a cute idea while the policies promoted are the ones you like. But how long before taxation is used to punish you for perfectly legal behavior that is not deemed acceptable by an elected official du jour?

4 responses to “France Gone Weird”

  1. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    Hollande’s government is dying to get its greasy little paws on controlling the internet in every way possible. It wants to mine it for taxes and slap censorship on ‘racist’ behaviour such as Islamophobia and homophobia (no neither was a race last time I looked either).

    Basically anyone who writes on the internet criticising homosexuals or Muslims will have the same treatment dished out to them as they would if they’d made a racist remark. The country is going crazy.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      And that’s just the beginning. I am convinced that the moment Internet censorship starts, it will only get worse and worse.

      “The country is going crazy.”

      – I hope there is still time to stop but for now it does look that way. 😦

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  2. Evelina Anville Avatar
    Evelina Anville

    I confess that I found the proposal a bit confusing. Are they taxing users? Or are they proposal a tax on companies who data mine? If it’s the later, (taxing companies hwo data mine), then I don’t see much of an issue with that. (I am actually uncomfortable with data mining to begin with. I find it creepy.) If it’s the former, I don’t think websites or individuals should be taxed….

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      “Are they taxing users? Or are they proposal a tax on companies who data mine? ”

      – Who knows? Once the precedent is set, just imagine what a great way to control Internet usage.

      “I am actually uncomfortable with data mining to begin with. I find it creepy.”

      – Where is a guarantee that this will stop at controlling only the practices that you dislike? Tomorrow it will be pornography (or what somebody decides is pornography), inconvenient political opinions, and God knows what else.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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