Well this is cool. Hanging out in Starbucks in Carp, drinking a mint tea (already over-coffeed for the day) and working online. It’s nice that they finally got around to taking care of their customers with a little Internet hook-up, but I still have to question their methods.

What Starbucks has done is to make another deal with a major telephone company for limited access to select customers, when they should have hooked up everyone for free. I had to put money on my Starbucks card, register it (and there’s the rub), then sign up for AT&T membership. That’s free enough, but still could have been better.

I have been in coffeehouses where the wi–fi was open to anyone in range, though you were expected to buy something of course. At others, I was given an access code with my purchase, and that was cool too. The advantage to these approaches was anonymity. I didn’t have to give anyone my name and address, as I did on the Starbucks site today.

So I wonder, when I logged on here at the store, was my exact location revealed to some database, accessible by the FBI, the NSA, CIA, or some other misbegotten, misanthropic progeny of the NKVD and the Spanish Inquisition? We are being watched, you know. Some of us are, and none of us is safe from it.

Thanks, Starbucks. And the tea is a little weak.