www.MarkTAW.com/culture_and_media/YouAreWhereYouLive.html (printable version)

There's a small town I learned about somewhere in the mid west. Everyone in this town has a shopper's card for the local super market. Everyone in this town has cable. Each night the people in this town watch TV. Different ads are shown to different households, and they watch their shopping patterns over the next few weeks to see which ads worked and which ones didn't. I learned about this town about 10 years ago in College.

Yes, those Customer Care and Preferred Customer cards are every bit as sinister as you thought they were. Barnes & Noble, for example, knows that I like to read books on marketing, secret societies, politics, music, decision theory, writing, spirituality, philosophy, logic, programming, design and alternative medicine. They even have some idea of my taste in music, and probably wonder why I occasionally buy craft books. (My girlfriend borrows my card.) Amazon.com's database on me is probably huge.... though it costs them just a few cents of drive space and electricity to keep it.

I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. Very similar research is going on everywhere you go, and on the Internet, it's very easy to track your habits. DoubleClick tracks you as you surf around the Internet. Any affiliate site sends them information on who visited there and when. If you log in to any of them, they know. If you provide personal information, they know. They now know that you like Football, are shopping for a car, and are pregnant. When you log in to your e-mail, if you provide your real contact information they can send you Football ads in the mail. If you didn't, they can still provide them as a pop ad.

Just recently my sister surfed some maternity sites (I'm going to be an uncle). When she logged in to her Yahoo! mail she saw several ads targeted towards pregnant women. She told me it was no coincidence.

EZ Pass - the card that gets you through tool booths - has been used to track down deadbeat dads. They even use it to see who's speeding. By monitoring your travel along the highway, they can see who's speeding and who isn't. They say that the data is scrambled and used for statistical purposes only, but one has to wonder.

The real purpose of this article though is to tell you about a fun online tool I discovered a few months ago. It's called "You Are Where You Live." A company called Claritas has broken down the nation into zip code neighborhoods. They then break down each neighborhood into one of 62 lifestyles. There's a bit of overlap, but that just shows how accurate the system is.

My neighborhood, for example, is #7, Money and brains, #9 American Dreams, #27, Urban Achievers, #29 Old Yankee Rows, and #45 Single City Blues. The closer you are to #1, the more affluent you are considered to be. My old work address on park Avenue, for example, turns up #6 Urban Gold Coast, #8 Young Literati, #10 Bohemian Mix, and #13 Gray Power. Notice how much tighter the spread and how much closer to #1 they all are.

By entering your zip code and that of your friends, you can learn about their neighborhood. This tool is meant to help you launch a targeting marketing campaign. If you were a paying customer, you would get a reverse search and define which of the 62 profiles you wished to market to and hit the neighborhoods with the heaviest density of that type of person.

One day, someone will take advantage of all this technology and put it to use for dating. "Hey baby, what's your zip code?" Or maybe "Hey, baby. What's your e-mail address?" (Quickly consults database as to her browsing habits...) "So do you like Opera? I love Opera..." (Lying, of course.)

Of course the absolute epitome of this is Carnivore, or the new Echelon. The FBI (or is it the CIA... I don't keep track of these things) denies that they're using it for anything other than what the government approves of - national defense, and lately the war on terror, though it's been made public that they don't filter out all the data that they're not supposed to.

See, it's illegal, even for the Government to spy on you. Unless, that is, they get the proper warrant. Well, this Echelon machine acts as a giant 'vacuum cleaner' and sucks up all sorts of stuff. Phone conversations, e-mails, chat conversations... I really have no idea, and the law is changing on a daily basis. Again, I don't keep up, and I'm sure someone else who knows more about this can talk to it in much greater depth than I can.

A google search should turn up something. Happy Searching.

• You Are Where You Live (US)
• City Profile Report (US)
• Up My Street(UK)
• Neighbourhood Statistics (UK)
• DoubleClick
• Double Click Opt Out
• Double Click Turns a Profit [internet.com]
• JunkBusters
• Anti Telemarkting Script  
• An Open Letter To Musicians Everywhere
• Left Wing Propoganda
• Added June 03, 2003: TiVo to Sell Customer Data While individuals will be anonymous, data will be made available in aggregate form, including ZIP code.
• Added July 06, 2003: Open Government Information Awareness "To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America."
• Added October 27, 2003: Undercover Advertising, a forum thread about advertisers who send actors out into the street and introduce their product to you by posing as an ordinary person.
• Added November 8, 2004: Retailers turning to databases to rein in customer returns "As more personal information is collected into databases, computers have been handed increasing power to make decisions about our everyday lives. The technological systems intend to solve costly and important business problems, but the proliferation of these so-called electronic blacklists has alarmed consumer and privacy advocacy groups who say many databases have incomplete, incorrect or misleading information." and Related Discussion.
  Best Buy hopes to exorcise devil patrons "Some see this as Best Buy trying to "have its cake and eat it too," by wanting to keep rebates, loss leaders, and massive promotions going, but exclude those who make routine use of them. Why not just stop with the marketing games?"  andRelated Slashdotting

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page first created on Monday, July 01, 2002

this site and it's contents copyright Mark Wieczorek