All this data we are putting into the web - say, into our blogs and into facebook and elsewhere, could be used for much more than just figuring out what kind of sneaker ads we're likely to want to see.
If you have a big enough and powerful enough database, and you felt like tracking more complex things than ad click-thru rates, you could start figuring out how different cues actually affect decisions, actions and opinions of specific people or groups of people. Let's say you had a captive portal where all sorts of data about an individual (oh, say, interests, education, religion, location) and relationships (the people in that person's network) and actions (causes they support, pictures they comment on), AND further more sophisticated content started going in there (say, blog posts - even a feed from a blog), then you could (and probably would) start analyzing what a person actually does.
And you could start correlating profiles with actions. Which in effect is what pollsters do, but with tiny bits of bad data from surveys and focus groups, from a discrete moment in time, and without any way to measure how responses correlate with actions. Whereas the net - and places like facebook - are enormous databases of detailed info about specific people, tracking not just static points of what they like or don't like, but also some of the things they actually do on the net, over weeks, months or years.
And that means, if you have access to that database, you might have a good platform to craft a strategy to make people do what you want them to do.
While that's a bit creepy when you think about Facebook and Myspace etc, let's face it: as the semantic web evolves (linking content with context), as bandwidth and database processing power grows, the web itself might as well be considered a captive portal, and we *will* continue to put all this data into the system. Much that you might wish to know about me, including my opinions on various political issues and the news that inspires my outrage or laughter, can be found on my personal blog, for all to see, catalog, measure and track. Probably it's a bit early for databases and modeling systems powerful enough to manage this kind of complex data - but it's coming.
So the worries about privacy and your data are much bigger than just targeted marketing ... there are much more sophisticated uses for our information.
Oh, and while I've been thinking this for a while, the spur that kicked me to think about it again, was the "about" page on Justin Hall's website that says:
The web and video games are merging. All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure. I am working to make that merging happen faster by developing "Passively Multiplayer Online Games" where your history of web browsing defines your online character.
Check the website of the research project: passively multiplayer.
Cool for vid games. But useful, and worrying, for all sorts of other applications.
Follow Hugh McGuire on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bookoven
so the question is, what happens when data tracking/web tracking is coupled with more powerful databases and modeling software?
will "they" be better able to control the actions of "people"? this is what traditional marketing is about, give a cue to spur an action. but traditional marketing works on terrible data, and the connections between cues and action are abstract (this ad for beer during the superbowl increased sales by 1% etc).
whereas on the net, you can see exactly *who* responds to *what* ... which means you can start modeling how people respond to different things, and you can start serving them the things that you know tend to make them do what you want.
so while things are probably bad now, they're going to get very different once facebook etc get get better at tracking and using the data that's collected - static data (what i like) and dynamic data (what i do).
How did the border guards know this? They just looked his name up on google and found his statement. The fact that he was working as a researcher studying LSD's effects was irrelevant. Just the fact he'd mentioned LSD online was enough to keep him out of the US forever it seems.
Right now our gov't is focused on foreigners, but these techniques can be used on anyone, by anyone.
The rush to authorize data mining by the Bush Administration sets a bad precedent for ensuring the future privacy of Americans.
The TIA (Total Information Awareness) program is back, now called ADVISE - for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement.
That program is able to cross-match material from websites and blog posts to government records and personal data.
So if you ever mention any indiscretion on a public website, you can expect that to come back and bite you some day. Or even if you just happen to visit websites that appear on some gov't watch list.
I can see a day when you'll apply for a job and they'll look you up in ADVISE and you'll be rejected for reasons you'll never know and never be able to challenge.
And since they also have access to your medical and financial data now, you can be rejected for a whole host of reasons unrelated to what you are applying for...
Big Brother is HERE NOW!