Three items together giving birth to a rant

A few years ago I was involved in creating a new public program for the science museum where I worked at the time. It was about human communication and one of the points I raised was the increasing use of advanced demographics, psychological testing, and in-store tracking technology to develop more effective advertising. Now, even that's not enough. A Christian Science Monitor commentary for December 22 reports that

[s]imply using focus groups, surveys, or common sense just isn't good enough anymore for the marketing industry. Now it is eyeing a medical technology known as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to see how people's brains react to certain products.

The BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, among others, is a leader in this "neuromarketing research." Located in the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital, the institute has its own Fortune 500 client and is part of BrightHouse, an advertising agency whose clients have included Coca-Cola and Home Depot.

Adam Koval, a BrightHouse executive, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year that neuromarketing "...will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave in the way they want them to behave." ...

This biology-based marketing tool needs broad public debate before it moves forward - with limits, if not an outright ban, to be considered.

How much more of this are we going to take? How much more before we say "enough?" Or have such matters already become too "routine?" Again from CSM, this time for December 5:

For millions of people, using a discount card at the local grocery store has become routine, a sure way to get the best prices, more convenient than coupons, and as unremarkable as a shopping list.

But 14 years after the cards were first introduced, a few iconoclasts are questioning the cards' value....

Rob Cockerham, a graphic designer and prankster, is among them. At his website he allows people to order a sticker with a copy of the barcode on the back of his Safeway card. Everyone who uses the sticker to cover the barcode on their own Safeway card - there are apparently about 500 people doing so now - will appear to the company's computer to be Cockerham, with appropriately confusing buying patterns.

While Cockerham sees the sabotage as lighthearted jabs in Big Brother's ribs, some privacy activists say it's time to get serious.

"His solution is brilliant, but it won't solve the problem," says Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering in Nashua, N.H.

"Many people think the way around the system is signing up as Mickey Mouse or George Orwell," she says. "But the minute a store scans an ATM or credit card, the shopper's real name goes at the top of the record."

Privacy activists say shopper data could be subject to seizure by court order - if, say, an attorney wanted to investigate the spending patterns of a defendant in a lawsuit or if police needed to establish who was in a store at a given time.

There's also the issue of unauthorized releases of information, says Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a think tank in Tucson, Ariz., that specializes in data-privacy issues. In one such leak, a low-level corporate employee allegedly volunteered information to a law enforcement agency shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Frankly, I'm more concerned about authorized releases of information. Your buying patterns, especially when compared to others in the geographic area, can tell a great deal about who you are - not just your name and address, but personality, interests, preferences. They can even be indicators of socioeconomic status. (Do a lot of your shopping at midnight? You probably work an evening shift. Tend to go for sale items, coupon discounts, cheaper meats? You probably don't earn a great deal.)

While supermarkets are coy about it, one of the gains of the discount card system (besides supposedly building "customer loyalty") is the ability to market information about customers to other corporations and mailing list companies. That is, selling our personal information. The industry claims that the number of people buying the number of things in any given supermarket in any given week makes that impractical, but frankly that's nonsense. If the information is in the database, a properly phrased query can spit it out. The question isn't practicality but profitability. And the more data there is - and the amount grows with every purchase - the smaller a portion of the data is needed for marketing it to become profitable.

Consider this: If in fact there is no practical way and no point to connecting your buying patterns to you individually, why do they ask for name and address in applying for a card? Why attach info from an ATM or charge card to the customer file? Why not simply assign a random number to each cardholder without getting any other info? That would, in fact, still enable stores to gather and even market aggregate information about their customer base but at least it would be without any of that information being traceable to you personally. I can't think of any argument against that. Fraud protection? What fraud when the discounts are freely available to anyone with a card? To keep people from having multiple cards? So what if they do? It gains them nothing except in those rare instances of "limit of X per customer" sales. Even targeted coupons of the sort we get so often now with our grocery receipts are usually based on what you just bought. (Of course, they could be based on your overall buying history - but if they are, that blows a big hole in the industry's claims it's not tracking people individually.) On the other hand, I have to admit the instant coupons are not always so well targeted: I recently got one for baby food which let's just say is not something for which I've had a use for a very long time.

All in all, wanting a name and address to get a card seems a waste of time and of space in the database - unless there is some other use for it, some use that involves directly connecting you with your purchases. For me, when the supermarket I went to started using the cards, I switched to a store that didn't (and still doesn't). And I told the managers of both the old card-using store and the new non-card-using store that I switched for that reason.

These sorts of casual invasions of our privacy have become so common that no one even seems to feel the need to justify them. Just recently, I made a partial deposit of my wife's paycheck at our local bank. They asked for a picture ID. Okay, I figured, I'm a new customer, they don't know me, and I am getting cash back (although it was less than 20% of the check). So I showed my driver's license. The teller proceeded to write the licence number on the back of the check. When I asked why, I was initially met with a confused stare.

"You've in effect just given the people who issued that check personal information about me. My driver's license number. I want to know why."

"That's our policy."

"I didn't ask if it was your policy. I asked why."

"All banks do it."

"That's not what I asked you. I asked why. I understand asking for ID. I want to know why you write that ID on the check"

"Well, these people already know you...."

"But they didn't know my driver's license number. Until now. Why is it on the check?"

We went through this maybe a half-dozen times before a clearly-irritated senior teller who joined the exchange was finally pinned down to a point where she actually had to give a reason. Not surprisingly, it was supposed to be for my own good.

"It's fraud protection. If someone stole your check and then you came in here and said you didn't authorize this person to cash this check, we could use the information to track back to them."

"And we're supposed to assume that someone who deals in stolen checks is not going to have phony ID?"

"Well, then it would go to the police."

"Yes, but then the number still wouldn't help you track them down, would it?"

Remember, this check - or something over 80% of it - was being deposited in my (and my wife's) own account, the name and address on the deposit slip matched that on my driver's license, and they have a signature card on file. Besides that, they were of course videotaping whatever was going on at the counter. In short, putting the number on the check was utterly pointless.

Well, not pointless, exactly, just pointless in terms of being in any way for my benefit. The point of many of these outrages is revealed, rather inadvertently, in considering another "advancement," again one supposedly for the benefit of the victim. In reading this rather long excerpt from a New York Times article from Sunday, see if you see a connection among all the incidents.

On the train returning to Armonk, N.Y., from a recent shopping trip in Manhattan with her friends, Britney Lutz, 15, had the odd sensation that her father was watching her.

He very well could have been. Ms. Lutz's father, Kerry, recently equipped his daughters with cellular phones that let him see where they are on a computer map at any given moment. Earlier that day, he had tracked Britney as she arrived in Grand Central Terminal. Later, calling up the map on his own cellphone screen, he noticed she was in SoHo. ...

"They know I care. And they know I'm watching."

Driven by worries about safety, the need for accountability, and perhaps a certain "I Spy" impulse, families and employers are adopting surveillance technology once used mostly to track soldiers and prisoners. New electronic services with names like uLocate and Wherify Wireless make a very personal piece of information for cellphone users - physical location - harder to mask.

But privacy advocates say the lack of legal clarity about who can gain access to location information poses a serious risk. And some users say the technology threatens an everyday autonomy that is largely taken for granted. The devices, they say, promote the scrutiny of small decisions - where to have lunch, when to take a break, how fast to drive - rather than general accountability. ...

Still, personal location devices are beginning to catch on, largely because cellular phones are increasingly coming with a built-in tether. A federal mandate that wireless carriers be able to locate callers who dial 911 automatically by late 2005 means that millions of phones already keep track of their owners' whereabouts. Analysts predict that as many as 42 million Americans will be using some form of "location-aware" technology in 2005. ...

"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."

Some of those consequences have not been spelled out. Will federal investigators be allowed to retrieve information on your recent whereabouts from a private service like uLocate, or your cellular carrier? Can the local Starbucks store send advertisements to your phone when it knows you are nearby, without your explicit permission? ...

[Nate] Bingham's parents use an AT&T service called Find Friend that lets them see his general location when his cellphone is on, based on the company's nearest cellular tower. He said his mother had at times asked him where he was and then used the service to see if he was telling the truth. ...

With uLocate, Tom Pratt set up his account on the company's Web site to establish a "geofence" around his home and his children's school. Every time the kids leave a 400-foot radius of either place, he gets an automatic e-mail alert: "Ashley has exited Home at 08:18 AM," read a typical message last week. ...

Howard Boyle, president of a fire sprinkler installation company in Woodside, N.Y., presented his employees with no such choice. The five workers who have been given company phones with the G.P.S. feature have not been told that Mr. Boyle can find out if they have arrived at a work site, and whether they are walking around in it or sitting still.

"They don't need to know," said Mr. Boyle, who hopes the service will help him determine the truth when clients claim they are being overbilled for the time his employees spent at their location. "I can call them and say, 'Where are you now?' while I'm looking at the screen and knowing exactly where they are, just to make sure they're not telling me they're somewhere else." ...

Graham Clarke...recently installed a tracking device called Followit in the Jeep Wrangler of his 17-year-old son, Gordon. It alerts him if Gordon has exceeded 60 m.p.h. or traveled beyond preset boundaries. ...

Jerold Surdahl, 40, an administrator in a building management office in Centerville, Ohio, said he started using the uLocate service to communicate with colleagues. Now, he is intrigued by the possibility of stashing a location-tracking phone in the trunk of his wife's car.

"I'm not expecting or hoping or wanting to find something, but I would just like to explore the possibilities," Mr. Surdahl said. "I'd tell her about it later."

Okay. Are the children going to be able to track the parents? Are the employees going to be able to track the boss? Will the public be tracking government agents or Starbucks executives?

Of course not. It seems silly even to ask. But it serves to point up that common thread I was talking about. This is not about protection or accountability, it's about power. Establishing, using, extending, demonstrating power. Whether it's the direct intimidating power of "they know I'm watching" or the more subtle power of "I can catch them at something," both of which assume those being watched are untrustworthy (which is what the watchers always assume about the watched), it is in every instance save the last, something those with power put on those without it. And in that last case, it's about establishing the power of voyeurism, the power of "I can know your secrets."

Are there potential benefits to the technology? Of course there are. But we need to ask ourselves if those claimed benefits - being able to find a wandering Alzheimer's patient, for example - are really what the growing attacks on our personal information, our privacy, our "right to be left alone," as William O. Douglas once put it, are and are going to be about.