Brandwashed Page 28
Companies and retailers know full well that our price sensitivity varies across the day, week, month, and year. Sometimes we enter a store determined to find a bargain, while other times, like when we’re in a pinch or a hurry, we couldn’t care less. Well, guess what? Thanks to data-mining technology, in some countries supermarkets and other large retailers know exactly when we’re willing to shell out more for products—and are altering their prices accordingly.
Enter digital signage! In Scandinavia, some supermarkets are already switching their prices daily, and across Japan some are even doing so on an hourly basis. The factors that currently determine the price of an item include weather (bad weather means that prices go up) and the density of customers in the store (lots of customers means prices decrease). I can promise you that this trend can lead to one thing and one thing only: in the future, prices will begin fluctuating like the stock market, creating a sort of game (remember the addictive quality of games) out of getting the lowest prices for your everyday stuff.
Companies are using data mining to play on our price sensitivities in other ways, too. Over the past year, a whole new data-mining tool has taken flight, and many Fortune 100 companies are embedding it into their Web sites as we speak. It’s called Predicta.net, and its purpose is simple: Predicta allows Web sites to identify then segment shoppers based on what they do and where they go online, then direct highly specific advertising and marketing tailored to how much they’re willing to spend.
Let’s say that just this morning you were perusing a sale on Best Buy.com for a digital camera. If the Best Buy site is enabled with Predicta (whose clients include Visa, Philips, and Hewlett-Packard),33 it immediately knows two things: that you’re in the market for a digital camera and that you’re a true bargain hunter. Thus it serves you up a “personalized” coupon that offers a shockingly good discount on—yes!—that very same camera you’ve been hunting down all morning. There’s only one catch: you’ll have to visit the store to buy it (where you may spot and be unable to resist that laptop you’ve had your eye on). In short, based on what online searches you have made or Web sites you’ve visited, Predicta will ensure that the entire home page of the store you coincidentally decided to visit is redesigned in a split second to feature—guess what?—the camera you’ve been checking out all morning. This is known as “behavioral targeting,” and as data-mining technologies become cheaper and easier to use, it’s becoming an increasingly popular tactic among marketers of all stripes.
Let’s take a slightly different scenario: Say your friend spent the morning searching for a premium camera on the Canon or Nikon home page. This time the Predicta-enabled site realizes in a split second that a bargain offer isn’t for her and that she’s willing to pay a high price for all the bells and whistles, which is why it offers up its best-quality camera—along with a coupon that gives her a slight discount on an equally high-end leather carrying bag (though the camera itself is for full price, of course). The upshot is essentially what economists call price discrimination: you and your friend end up buying the same item, but at radically different prices.
An even newer software program known as Baynote (in use by companies including AT&T and apparel maker Anthropologie) not only tracks your online purchases, where you scroll on a page, what you click, and what search terms you use on any given site, but also refines its search results to recommend to you products based on what products have appealed to users who have browsed and searched similar products.34 In one example, when AT&T noticed that people were plugging in a lot of searches for a new phone model known as Insight, Baynote was able to bump Insight up higher on the search results on the AT&T Web site in a matter of minutes. And AT&T is not alone. EBay has a team that buys Internet search terms in order to drive search traffic back to its site.
Predicta and Baynote are just two of the many variations on a new and increasingly widespread marketing tool called “personalized retargeting” or “remarketing” that is popular with retailers like Diapers.com, eBags.com, and the Discovery Channel, as well as companies that sell real estate, travel, and financial services online. These programs capture the “cookies” that your computer automatically deposits into your Web browser, creating an indelible imprint of every site you visit and every page you view, then use that information to send you personalized offers relating to anything you have read, viewed, or bought online. This, in fact, was the mysterious force behind a bizarre tale of a pair of stalkerish shoes. As the New York Times reported last year, one morning a Canadian mother of two saw and admired the pair of shoes on Zappos, the huge online shoe retailer. From then on, the shoes just wouldn’t leave her alone. “For days and weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” the woman recalled.
“Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Web sites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content,” the article went on, adding, “Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes, Ms. Matlin said she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. ‘They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,’ ” she says.35
Last year researchers at the University of California at San Diego found that “a significant proportion of the 50,000 most-visited sites on the Web” 36 were engaging in some manner of behavioral tracking—with some even employing an analysis known as “history sniffing,” which delves into our past browsing behavior to uncover what sites we’ve visited in past months or even years. (Note: as of writing this kind of tracking doesn’t work on Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, or Firefox, though it will work on Internet Explorer.) Similarly, sites like Perez Hilton, Wired, Technorati, and Answerbag employ an analytics service known as Tynt.com, which measures what articles users cut and paste, a spying protocol known as “behavior sniffing.” 37
Experiencing a recurrent pain in your abdomen? Having trouble sleeping? Concerned about a relative’s depression? What do you do? I’m guessing you go straight to the Internet, where you quickly type in the symptoms. This is why some pharmacy chains are now monitoring our search patterns online. Imagine how valuable this data is for drugstores. Not only can they use it to send us offers related to our specific condition, but they know what health concerns are most prevalent in our geographic area or among our demographic and can alter their inventory or in-store signage accordingly. As of writing, a number of prominent consumer organizations are asking the FTC to investigate deceptive ads that pop up when we go online to hunt down medical or prescription drug information. Notes the consumer complaint, “Nearly $1 billion dollars will be spent this year by online health and medical marketers targeting the growing number of U.S. consumers who increasingly rely on the Internet for information about medical problems, treatments, and prescription drugs.” 38 Among the companies named in the complaint are Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, WebMD, QualityHealth, Everyday Health, and HealthCentral. What’s more, as of writing, pharmaceutical and other health-oriented marketers are pressuring the FDA to grant them greater latitude to expand their online advertising, whether it’s through data mining, Internet-search monitoring, or online behavioral profiling.
In short, even the most private details about our health aren’t safe from data miners.
Gay or Straight? Advertisers Know.
Thanks to social media, our digital footprints have gone from a faint silhouette in the sand to a sprawling, multiclawed track that could easily belong to Bigfoot. One of the main culprits is the Web site everyone loves, loves to hate, and otherwise cannot live without, namely, Facebook. Ready to know what they know?
Although Facebook’s much-maligned privacy policies have generated a lot of controversy, they are fairly straightforward—that is, if you bother to take the time to read them. The site claims it does not share personally identifiable information with advertisers “unless we get your permission.” At the same time, Facebook does allow “advertisers to choose the characteristics of users w
ho will see their advertisements” 39 and retains the right to use any attributes the site has collected—including information you may have opted to keep private, such as your birthday—“to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements.” Scarier still, the site adds, “When (users) click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in (their) browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.” Which is just a confusing way of saying that if you click on an ad, that advertiser reserves the right to pull up as much information as your Facebook account permits and use it to sign you up for months and even years of “conveniently personalized” ads.
In the fall of 2010, a Wall Street Journal article made waves when it revealed that nearly a dozen popular Facebook apps, including Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille, and FarmVille, were sharing information (including users’ names and the names of those users’ friends) with at least twenty-five advertising and Internet-tracking companies, shattering all Facebook’s privacy rules and compromising the privacy of 70 percent of all those who regularly use apps on Facebook, even those who maintained the most secure privacy settings. Though no one was able to prove that Facebook had any prior knowledge of this breach, the shocking affair “renew[ed] questions about [Facebook’s] ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure,” the Journal reported.40
If this wasn’t enough to make you want to sell your virtual farm, disband your Mafia crew, and deactivate your profile, a few weeks later the other shoe dropped. This time, it was the New York Times that broke the story, revealing that in some cases Facebook advertisers (or, as the article put it, “snoops posing as advertisers”) could capture sensitive profile data, including users’ sexual orientations and religions (even though, as a policy, Facebook does not trade this information with marketers).
As an experiment, researchers in India and Germany created six separate Facebook user accounts. These accounts were identical except for one difference: in two of the six the (fake) user checked off that he/she was interested in persons of the same sex. Not surprisingly, gay-specific ads (e.g., ads for gay bars) soon began to pop up on the sites of the individuals who had revealed themselves to be gay, as did other ads that had no link to users’ sexual preferences. However, since these seemingly neutral ads appeared exclusively on gay men’s pages, if the user clicked on one of them and was taken to that company’s site, he would be dropping a “unique identifier” telling that company or advertiser that he was gay. And while the identifier, “typically a cookie or a computer’s Internet address,” does not necessarily disclose the identity of the person who clicked,” the Times reported, “privacy experts said an advertiser could potentially obtain the name in other ways and link it to the user’s sexual orientation, perhaps by asking the person to sign up for a newsletter or fill out a form.”
In a related experiment, a Stanford researcher placed an ad on Facebook targeting users based on their location, age, gender, interests, and sexual orientation. She next placed a Facebook ad targeting those characteristics, including ads aimed at users interested in same-sex relationships. As the “advertiser” she was able to see whom Facebook had chosen to display that particular ad to—and could thus conclude that that person was gay. According to the New York Times, she concluded that someone could use this same technique to find other profile information supposedly protected by the privacy settings, including relationship status and political and religious affiliations, and that it could even be “on other social networks or Web sites, like Google and MySpace.” 41
True, no identifying names are involved, and true, Facebook doesn’t directly or deliberately share your personal information with advertisers (or if it does, I can’t prove it). Still, it doesn’t make it all that difficult for probing advertisers to get around its privacy control, either. In fact, the site is notorious for constantly changing and tweaking its privacy policy—and each time it does, it’s an excuse for the site to reset users’ privacy controls to a default setting. And after all, what is Facebook if not an incomparably rich database of information about every detail of our lives, and what is Facebook’s business model if not one of reliance on its partnerships with advertisers? Noting that someday soon Facebook will represent the “default single sign-on for the web,” the Financial Times imagines a nightmarish future fantasy in which “a user shares information about their eating and exercise habits on Facebook, and this is paired with other information, such as web browsing history, by any number of so-called ‘data mining’ companies. These companies create a profile of the user that is sold to various parties, potentially including health insurers. Based on some of this unflattering information, the insurer decides to deny the user coverage.” 42
Every Step You Take
If you want to keep your personal information away from data miners, I also suggest you stay away from Foursquare, which not only stores any information you provide, including your IP address, browsing history, phone number, birthday, and more, each time you “check in” somewhere but also reserves the right to “draw upon this personal information in order to adapt the services of our community to your needs, to research the effectiveness of our network, and to develop new tools for the community,” as well as to “provide aggregate information to our partners about how our customers collectively use our site.”43 Of course, Foursquare claims, “We share this type of statistical data so that our partners also understand how often people use their services and our Service, so that they, too, may provide you with an optimal online experience,” but this really means it reserves the right to share any of your information with third-party search engines, businesses, and advertisers—and in real time, too. And what happens if you broadcast your Foursquare location to all your buddies on Facebook, as most people do? Well, uh, then, “such information is no longer under the control of Foursquare and is subject to the terms of use and privacy policies of such third parties.”44 In other words, it’s fair game for all.
But perhaps the biggest thorn in privacy advocates’ paw is Google, the king of the Internet, which has made it a corporate mission to “organize the world’s information.” Known for having the most sophisticated and predictive algorithms and data-tracking capabilities of any site on the Web, Google not only knows what you search for and links our accumulated search patterns to the computers we use, it knows what online videos you watch, what music you stream, what articles you read, what files you download, and more. It also knows what’s in your e‑mails—which it scans automatically for the purpose of serving you up “contextual advertising,” that is, targeted advertising for products somehow related to something you’ve just e‑mailed about. And of course, thanks to Google Maps, it also knows where you live, what books are on your shelves, what car is parked in your driveway, and whether or not there’s a wisp of smoke coming out of your chimney.
If you sign up for Google Buzz, an online service that’s also available via your smart phone, Google will know even more. Google Buzz works by bringing together all the information you post on various social media—including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, and Picasa—in one place. If you subscribe, Buzz not only will know who appears in your photos, what topics you tweet about on Twitter, and what you “like” on Facebook; it will “geo-tag” your Buzz post so it will also know exactly where you are at all times. And since what Google Buzz does differently from other social media services is filter the information from people you’ve signed on to follow so that only the most popular content shows up in your in-box, Google will also know which individuals are the most valuable or influential members of your circle—in other words, which individuals are the most irresistible marks for advertisers.
Still, if you thought this was bad, wait until you find out how advertisers and data miners will use social media to brandwash you in the future. Software company SAS recently rolled out a product that can analyze the “chatter” across social media, including Face
book and Twitter, and identify those who post the most influential comments and are therefore the best marketing targets. Last year a broad array of companies, including Amazon, joined forces with Facebook. Now, if you opt into this particular alliance, not only will Amazon be able to see what books and music you—and any of your friends who have also opted in—deem cool and market to you accordingly, but if you view a product on Amazon, a little icon will tell you how many of your friends “like” it on Facebook. It’s data mining meets peer pressure at its finest.
Surrendering Our Immortal Souls
As if this digital spying weren’t enough, companies also have a lot of tricks up their sleeves for getting us to voluntarily divulge a whole lot of data. If you want to cash a paycheck at a Walmart, for example, you must surrender both your Social Security number and your driver’s license information, and quite often your e‑mail address. Guess where that information ends up? You guessed it, in Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. And if Walmart were working with a “data enhancement company” (which, as of writing, it’s not), merely divulging your e‑mail address could reveal not just your name and address but also additional information about the value of your house and even the size of your mortgage.