The year is 2002 and the place is Minneapolis. A father walks into a Target store and demands to see the manager. In his hand is a bunch of coupons and he says to the manager: “My daughter got these in the mail! She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” The manager, clearly didn’t have a clue so he apologizes to the man and then calls him a few days later to apologize again. This time though, the father's tone is different. He says: “I had a talk with my daughter, it turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She is due in August. I owe you an apology.”
The story is reported by the local news agency and gets more and more attention until the New York Times picks it up and investigates it. They finally got a hold of someone at Target who knew about this. His name was Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target.
Andrew explains that the marketing team realized that “right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed; their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs.” They found out that “the key is to reach them early before any other retailers know a baby is on the way.” And that's where their mathematical model comes into play. They “tracked every single action, every purchase of every customer and came up with a model to predict the chance of pregnancy”.
Target soon bans him from talking to the media anymore but in his last interview he says that they are changing the outline of the coupon booklets. Now, the selected customers get pregnancy coupons that are surrounded by unsuspicious things like wine or garden mower. This way, people think it's just a booklet that everyone on their block received as well.
This, was 2002! Today, this is part of our daily reality. It's not just Target. Every company is doing data mining to maximize profit. Things that should be none of their business, is now all of their business.
MoviePass is an app that sells unlimited tickets to movies. Its CEO had a speech in a technical conference just a month ago entitled “Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It?” In his talk he said: “We get an enormous amount of information. We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.” Yes. Everybody is doing this now.
I'm sure you've heard about the new Facebook scandal where they essentially let a British company harvest 87M Americans’ information. The only thing is, it's not a scandal. This, is their business model.
I was researching what kind of information Facebook has about you. As it turned out; everything!
They have built for every user what's called “shadow profiles”. On it, you will first find things that you posted online yourself, like your age, sex, education, hometown and etc. But, they haven’t stopped there.
They’ve bought and gathered data about you from every sources. There are things on it like: if you own a house or if you rent, how much you pay for that, how many people are in your household, how much is your salary, what are your spending habits, what's your life style!
They haven't collected these data because they're so obsessively in a creepy love with you. It's because they can sell these data about you to advertisers.
Today, it's safe to say that every single action you take and every single word that you say on the Internet is stored somewhere on a few hard drives forever.
And then, we now have smart TVs and home assistant devices that even record conversations in your house.
You might say: “I don't care about privacy, I don't have anything to hide”.
Edward Snowden, who I believe should be named as a hero, says: “[saying this, is like] saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing [important] to say".
And by the way, privacy is not about hiding, it's about having a private space. It's the reason why we use envelopes or curtains in our homes or even wear clothes.
But this private space is being invaded today from every direction. Your Internet provider, your email service, your social media, your bank, your news website and online shopping websites, they are all tracking everything and building profiles about you, your personality and preferences.
Think of it as giving your credit card number to every website you visit where it's up to them to decide when and how they want to use it. The only difference is, in regards to the credit cards, you do have the option of changing the number whenever you want. But in regards to these profiles, you can't change who you are. You don't even want to do that!
It's actually like giving a 3D scan of your fingerprint to every company knowing that all your locks open with your fingerprint.
At this point, you may be wondering what solution I may have. I believe it is a process that you and I ought to engage in. For now, I'll leave you with this. There is good and bad news here. The good news is: there are solutions available. The bad news is, there is no easy solution. It is more of a process than a single action. You need to invest time, money and energy to achieve the solution. But perhaps more importantly, you and I will need to care about this enough to seriously look for solutions. We need to be willing to say to these companies: “My life is none of your business”.
::samic::