Fresh Air On "the Numerati"

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October 2, 2008

Monday’s Fresh Air has a great interview with the author of “The Numerati,” a book about demographic profiling and the mathematical modeling of consumer information.

There are a lot of pieces to the privacy puzzle, and they don’t always seem to be that closely related. We tend to compartmentalize a lot of privacy issues:

“Do I care if Fred Meyer knows my preferences in breakfast cereal?”

“Do I want AT&T engineering datamining into its network?”

“Is it o.k. if a company I do business with sells my address to a partner?”

“How happy am I that even if I avoid things like Facebook, a marketing profile can be built about me merely by assessing the people who don’t avoid Facebook but fed it their address books, which include me?”

You can find people adamantly opposed to any of those things, including the first. But we tend to look at each of those issues as somewhat discrete from the others.

In the interview, Stephen Baker starts with the supermarket loyalty card, explaining how RFID will be combined with those cards to make them more effective for both keeping desirable customers and discouraging undesirable ones. From there he moves on to the way the statistical science applied to things like loyalty cards can work for political marketing, helping campaigns micro-target voter types who’d otherwise be overlooked because their districts are broadly understood to “belong” to the other party. And then he takes all of that and rolls it into the way demographic profiling and mathematical modeling are finding their way into the national security apparatus.

The interviewer (Dave Davies in this case) asks, during the political marketing segment of the conversation, what the point is of finding a handful of voters of one persuasion in a district dominated by voters of the other persuasion, and whether it’s worth the expense to find them at all, to which Baker replies “How much would Al Gore have paid for 300 of those voters in Florida in 2000?”

I’m reserving a copy of the book. The author sounds reasonable, and his presentation didn’t involve the sort of flustered, paranoid fulminating that makes talking about these issues so frustrating sometimes.

(Link)