Personal Technology Defense - no, I'm not talking about defense technology, I'm talking about all the things you have to do to protect your own technology from the ways other people -- primarily advertisers -- want to use it to get to you.

It was just virus and trojan horse programs for a while, then annoying banner ads and flaming logos, tracking cookies followed and not long after spy software that installs itself on your computer and pops up ads right over other websites. I wrote about LL Bean filing suit against companies who paid to have their ads placed over the top of LL Bean's website by spyware programs in this earlier blog entry. Spam mail gets bigger and bigger, some say its approaching 80% of total electronic mail volume. Worms and trojan horse programs that take advantage of weaknesses in our software make day to day computing less and less productive. Even the software we buy advertises to us now. Barely a single screen in my Quickbooks software -- something I paid dearly for -- misses an opportunity to try to sell me an add-on service of one kind or another. Real Audio may as well be a virus, with Quicktime not far from that. On and on it goes.

But its not just your computer anymore either. On television, hardly 2 minutes ever go by that doesn't have an obvious and prominent product placement. We have tv style commercials in the movie theater -- when we've paid to be there. My kids video tapes and dvds have around 10 minutes of advertising stuck to the front of them. Watching sports on TV now, they superimpose logos and ads on the white spaces around the stadium and even onto the field. Athletes are being paid to get tattoos of logos so even that close up shot has a logo of some kind in it.

Now we're seeing the first stirrings of localized text messaging so that when you walk by an item it can bug you on your cell phone or blackberry. Add RFID tags to the mix, and every shelf in the grocery store will know what items you already purchased and be able to respond with related offers. Imagine your shopping cart suggesting alternative brands when you pick your cold medicine. Take that example into the personal care section of the drug store and start to imagine the annoyance.

With this ever-increasing advertising blitz, an entire new industry will be born. I call it "Personal Technology Defense" -- its already got its roots in the anti-spam, anti-spybot, anti-advertising software we use to protect our PC's but as an industry its only just beginning. My own first contribution is due shortly. I'm working on a whitepaper called "Take back your PC" for the end user community we all know. I'm using as a model target the guys on the fire department who bring me their spyware and virus infected computers to clean.

You can't just say "stop using IE and Outlook Express" to an end user. These programs are ubiquitous. I hope I can produce a how-to manual for getting there.

If you have contributions, please, email me or type them here.