December 10, 2012--BlueKai

There was a chilling article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Who Do They Think You Are?" about data aggregation and how marketers are now able to pitch you in extraordinarily targeted way.

With the assistance of data mining or data aggregating companies such as BlueKai, they are able to come up with a profile of your buying and Web-searching activities that allow advertisers to send personalized ads to virtually all of your portable devices.

For example, if BlueKai has figured out from your personal computer "cookies" (more about this in a moment) that you are a traveler and might have an interest in visiting Hawaii, your smartphone will light us with ads from Hawaiian hotels and restaurants.

The hotels are informed about your interest by the BlueKai folks who gained access to your interests via deals with Google, deals in which Google sells them your search history, and then they initiate a bidding war among Hawaiian hotels and restaurants to sell to the highest bidder exclusive access directly to your computer, iPhone, and iPad so that they can proceed to flood ads in your direction.

It is clearly only a matter of time before this will also happen when you are zonked out in front of your television (assuming by then that you'll even be interested in boring old TV). So while watching the Super Bowl, rather than being bombarded by ads for Buicks (the marketers will know you have no interest in American cars), you will get personally-dircted ads for whatever it is you're into--Hawaiian vacations, gourmet cooking, jazz, the latest James Bind movie, or Republican politics.

It's all about cookies. Invented in 1994 by a Netscape genius, Lou Montulli, cookies might be considered an electronic trail of every search you engaged in, every Website you visited, and every purchase you made on line. Data miners gain access to this information (forget any notion of privacy) and from this situate you in one of at least 30,000 profiles they have created that are then helpful to people wanting to sell you stuff.

So, if you are classified as an "independently wealthy opera lover," you will be hearing about access to Metropolitan Opera pod casts and travel opportunities to Milan where tickets to La Scala are available.

If you fit the "gay married Scotch drinker" profile, Dewers ads will be popping up on your iPhone and every time you go to Goggle, you're computer screen will tell you about the next nearby Barry Manilow concert.

If you are a "vegetarian comic book collector," then . . . to tell the truth I'm not clever enough to figure out what to pitch you.

These may sound like crude categorizations, and in fact they are, but they are only the beginning of what will eventually become much more nuanced and targeted. I can easily foresee the day when companies such as BlueKai will have not 30,000 profiles but 300 million--one for pretty much each and every one of us. There will be a cookie-characterized "Steven Zwerling" about whom they will know me even better than Rona does, since I try to keep a few things secret even from her.

They will know my exact age and birthday, my annual income and net worth, my medical history, all my purchases both on line and in person via credit cards, my political inclinations and donations, what I think about abortion and same-sex marriage, which visual artists I like, everything I read both on-line and in print, all my blogging and the comments I leave on other people's blogs, what sports teams I root for, all my travels, including every Holiday Inn and B&B I ever stayed in, all my food preferences, the movies and music I like, the toothpaste I use, and my favorite porn sites.

This feels well beyond anything portended in 1984 or Fahrenheit 451.

But there is one glimmer of good news--you can right now go to BlueSki's Website and, because of their professed commitment to transparency, look up your own individual profile, what they call your "digital footprint," and from that learn what they know about you "from anonymous sources."

Of course I did this and, considering how much I use my computer--searching endlessly and buying lots of stuff on line--I was surprised and, I admit, a little disappointed when they reported that they "currently do not have any anonymous data" on me.

Am I so out of things, I wondered with concern, so trapped in the 20th century that I am not leaving a digital footprint useful either to hucksters or posterity?

So I looked a little further for, hopefully, an explanation. There was one--

"If your computer is shared, this may reflect interests from other members of your household."

My computer is in fact shared. With Rona. And so, if you were to combine my cookies with hers, considering I tend to order books and power tools and she is inclined to order herbal tea and bath salts, our combined digital footprint would defy the detective skills of even a Sherlock Holmes.

Though I could see one that would fit the combined two of us--"do-it-yourself new age natural foody."
Or "bookish sybarite."

But then there was Rona's recent on-line purchase of a couple of bras. This must have thrown the good folks at BlueSki for a loop--"cross-dressing presidential biography addict"?

Which leads me to realize that my cookie trail, if publicly revealed (and of course it would be), means that as an apparent ladies undergarment purchaser I would never be able to be elected president of the United States.

But then again there was the director of the FBI--J. Edgar Hoover.