by
Walter Brasch
The government’s knowledge of the lives of
individuals is little more than the equivalent to a children’s coloring book
compared to the library that private companies have on everyone.
Doubt that? Just open your mail any day;
chances are good you’ll have more junk mail—the corporations prefer to call it
“direct mail”—than anything else. Check your email; if you’re not being spammed
hourly, you are probably one of the few people in the U.S. who is living in an
underground bomb shelter with no access to the outside world.
Americans routinely fill out myriad forms
that ask all kinds of personal information. Buy an appliance—or just about
anything—and some database company learns not just the name, address, and where
and when the customer bought that item, but also family income, what pets the
family has, and the family’s hobbies. Some “warranty” cards ask more than five
dozen questions, the data coded and stored on computers accessible by junk mail
advertisers.
Although the data helps companies notify
customers about product re-calls or new products, most Americans don’t know
they aren’t required to fill out the cards to get warranty protection.
Answer your telephone
and respond to someone who claims to be from a “marketing survey company,” and dozens
of offers will soon be yours to explore.
The marketing departments of the mass
media use databases not only to identify potential subscribers, but also to
identify the demographics of their own readers and viewers to potential
advertisers.
The first thing scanned at registers in
most supermarkets, department stores, discount stores, drug stores, and chain
stores of all kinds is the bar-coded membership card that alerts a computer to
record and analyze inventory, and track each purchase a customer makes. These
cards lure customers to believe they are getting special deals in exchange for
giving up their privacy. At its best, it may mean special coupons from manufacturers.
At its worst, it means the store sells the data to a health insurance company
that raises rates because it determines the customer bought too many bags of potato
chips.
With
the ubiquitous use of computers, every person who ever bought anything online,
or even searched for anything online—product or information—can now be
identified, their web addresses stored for use in target marketing campaigns.
Microtargeting,
essentially vacuuming every piece of data about every person, is what allows
corporations, marketing departments, and sales people to find specific groups
of people to add to direct mail and telemarketing campaigns.
Certain
groups won’t sell their membership lists; others, including most U.S. colleges,
are all too happy to get a few hundred dollars by supplying names and
demographic details to the marketing companies.
The
Republicans, using a program they labeled Voter Vault, mastered the use of the
technology to give them the tools they needed to reach donors and score
decisive “get out the vote” strategies in 2002 and 2004 elections. So
sophisticated had been the program that they could individually pitch every
household with a message crafted to that family.
By
2006, having lost two consecutive presidential elections and having been the
minority party for a decade, the Democrats caught up, creating first DataMart
and then Data Warehouse.
Two
years later, all candidates for presidential office had developed and used
databases, with the staff of Barack Obama having the greatest technological
skill not only to use social media to get its message to the people, but also
to be able to specifically target even the narrowest demographics with specific
messages.
Legally,
anyone can obtain voluminous data about anyone who has ever registered to vote,
owned property, sued, been sued, arrested, served in the military, been married
or divorced, licensed by any governmental agency, or attended a public school.
The databases are what help reporters develop stories, some exposing corrupt
governmental and business practices.
Almost
every American consumer now has a Fair Isaac score. The scores are based upon
dozens of reports about a person’s credit history, and are available to
Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union, the three major credit reporting companies.
FICO reports that 90 percent of the largest U.S. banks use the Fair Isaac
scores. About three-fourth of credit reports contain errors, with about
one-fourth of all credit reports containing significant errors that could
result in denial of credit, according to the California Public Interest
Research Group.
If
you’re using any social medium or search engine—Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In,
Google, Pinterest, or anything that is composed not of carbon atoms but bits
and bytes—you have been identified.
If
my publisher wished to target audiences for my current book, Fracking
Pennsylvania, she might first get a direct mail list of all
environmentalists. Then a sub-set of environmentalists in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps, she might also want a tighter list, so she asks for Pennsylvania
environmentalists who have purchased at least five books in the past year. She
could ask the direct marketing company to drill down even further and get those
in select ZIP codes who have a certain income range and are members of certain
societies. I suppose it’s possible to target Pennsylvania environmentalists who
live in the Marcellus Shale who bought at least five books last year, have a
college degree and incomes above $45,000, and drive red convertibles on
Sundays. A list of all Pennsylvanians might be a few cents a name; a highly
targeted list could be $1 a name.
You’ve
been warned.
[Dr. Brasch’s current book, Fracking Pennsylvania, is available at http://www.greeleyandstone.com,
amazon.com, or your local bookstore.]
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