Data
Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of
Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
http://albertpeia.com/datamining.htm
‘When most people think of "Big
Brother", they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of
Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies. Yes, they are
definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations. In fact, there
are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering
every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for
profit to anyone willing to pay the price. It is called "data
mining", and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything
that you do. Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but
data mining goes far beyond that. When you use a customer rewards card at
the supermarket, the data miners know about it. When you pay for a
purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about
it. Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to
someone. Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations
is notified. Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and
thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than
ever before. But that also means that our personal information is no
longer "private", and this trend is only going to get worse in the
years ahead.
You
have probably never even heard of many of these companies that are making
millions of dollars selling your personal information. Acxiom and Epsilon
are two of the biggest names in the industry, and most of the time they are
selling your information to companies that want to sell you stuff.
Almost
every single day, very
personal information about you is being bought and sold without your permission
and it is all perfectly legal.
A recent
article in The Week says the following about
Acxiom....
An
The
scale of the information gathering that Acxiom does is absolutely mind
blowing. If you can believe it, Acxiom actually keeps track of more than 190 million
people inside the
The
company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as
an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably
low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and
consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed
entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the
So
what does Acxiom want to know about you?
Everything.
The
following is from a recent New York Times article about
Acxiom....
IT
knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.
It
peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying
digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an
American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex,
weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits,
household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Companies
such as Acxiom literally want every shred of information about you that they
can possibly get.
Once
they gather all that data, Acxiom analyzes it, packages it and sells it to
large corporations such as Wells
And
being in the "Big Brother business" is very, very profitable.
Acxiom
made more than 77 million
dollars in profits during their latest fiscal year.
Some
members of Congress are very alarmed by all of this. According to U.S.
Senator John Kerry, this industry is virtually unregulated....
"There's
no code of conduct. There's no standard. There's nothing that safeguards
privacy and establishes rules of the road."
So
what do big corporations do with all of this data after they purchase it from
companies like Acxiom?
Well,
for one thing, they use it to try to predict how you will behave. A Daily Beast article gave some
examples of how this works....
Predicting
people’s behavior is becoming big business—and increasingly feasible in an era
defined by accessible information. Data crunching by Canadian Tire, for
instance, recently enabled the retailer's credit card business to create
psychological profiles of its cardholders that were built upon alarmingly
precise correlations. Their findings: Cardholders who purchased carbon-monoxide
detectors, premium birdseed, and felt pads for the bottoms of their chair legs
rarely missed a payment. On the other hand, those who bought cheap motor oil
and visited a
I
don't know about you, but I find that a bit creepy.
Later
on in that same article, how some
Other
industries have bolstered their bottom lines by predicting how consumers will
behave, according to Super Crunchers. UPS predicts when customers are at risk
of fleeing to one of its competitors, and then tries to prevent the loss with a
telephone call from a salesperson. And with its “Total Rewards” card, Harrah’s
casinos track everything that players win and lose, in real time, and then
analyze their demographic information to calculate their “pain point”—the
maximum amount of money they’re likely to be willing to lose and still come
back to the casino in the future. Players who get too close to their pain point
are likely to be offered a free dinner that gets them off the casino floor.
So is
all of this data gathering harmless?
Does
it simply make our economy more efficient?
Or is
there a greater danger here?
At
some point could all of our personal information be used for more insidious purposes?
One
thing is for sure - this is a trend that is not going away any time soon.
As
our society becomes even more integrated through the Internet, data gathering
is going to become even more comprehensive.
Eventually
these complicated computer algorithms will be able to make very detailed
predictions about your future behavior with a very, very high degree of
accuracy.
When
you add government snooping into the equation, it becomes easy to see why
privacy advocates are going crazy these days.
Our
society is literally being transformed into a technological monitoring grid.
Virtually everything we do is monitored, tracked and recorded in some way.
If we
are not very careful, eventually we could end up living in a society that is
much more oppressive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.
So
what do you think of all of this snooping, spying and data mining? Do you
believe that it is harmless or do you believe that it represents a significant
threat? Feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below....’
