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Years ago, an ad executive noted that half of all ad dollars were wasted. The trouble was, no one knew which half. That's changing now that new technology allows advertising to become a two-way communication.
I've been interested in private company surveillance for years now. I would highly recommend both Shane Harris' The Watchers, a book concerning government surveillance in the digital age, and Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, which deals with private watching.
A fun bit from Pariser's book: Target (perfect store for this story, don't you think?) implemented an analysis of shopping habits. By looking at what women bought and later bought, they were able to determine with a high degree of certainty what they might be interested in buying later based on what they bought now, and would send coupons to prompt that purchase. This went south when a man found they had mailed his 15-year-old daughter coupons for cribs and diapers. It gets better: It turned out Target was right. They figured out the girl was pregnant before she did.
Worried about these various entities colluding to build a highly-accurate and therefore potentially invasive profile of you based simply on your habits? You should be. It's the next growing industry.
Ted Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, has a wonderful new add-on for Firefox: Collusion. I highly recommend this. This add-on shows you which companies are stuffing cookies on your machine for further refinement of their advertising algorithms in the hopes of turning you into a target-rich environment for click-through non-sense. After a few clicks, they graph can morph into a surveillance monster, even on some pretty innocuous sites. Enjoy!
I've been interested in private company surveillance for years now. I would highly recommend both Shane Harris' The Watchers, a book concerning government surveillance in the digital age, and Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, which deals with private watching.
A fun bit from Pariser's book: Target (perfect store for this story, don't you think?) implemented an analysis of shopping habits. By looking at what women bought and later bought, they were able to determine with a high degree of certainty what they might be interested in buying later based on what they bought now, and would send coupons to prompt that purchase. This went south when a man found they had mailed his 15-year-old daughter coupons for cribs and diapers. It gets better: It turned out Target was right. They figured out the girl was pregnant before she did.
Worried about these various entities colluding to build a highly-accurate and therefore potentially invasive profile of you based simply on your habits? You should be. It's the next growing industry.
Ted Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, has a wonderful new add-on for Firefox: Collusion. I highly recommend this. This add-on shows you which companies are stuffing cookies on your machine for further refinement of their advertising algorithms in the hopes of turning you into a target-rich environment for click-through non-sense. After a few clicks, they graph can morph into a surveillance monster, even on some pretty innocuous sites. Enjoy!