Pushovers
Written in Autumn of 1997
Somewhere there is a big building with long, narrow hallways. Inside each door is a tall room, densely packed with file cabinets reaching to the ceiling. Each of those cabinets contains hundreds of drawers. Each of those drawers contains hundreds of folders. Each of those folders contains detailed information on a person, from their social security number to their spending habits to their daily travel itinerary. One of those people is you.
As advertising moves into the digital realm, individual consumers gain increased worth as they can be more directly targeted by advertising agencies. With their greater value comes a price, that of privacy and freedom.
With the explosive popularity of the Internet has come an unanticipated hitchhiker: commercialism. The on-line marketing world is a fast-growing field that offers more for both advertisers and consumers than anything that has existed before.
Advertisers love it. The most important aspect of marketing is targeting the appropriate audience. Why shoot with a shotgun when a .22 will do? If you're selling cheap furniture, target people in their early 20s. If you're selling retirement financial planning, target people in their late 50s. Specificity ensures little wasted money.
Advertisers usually sell by placing ads during television shows that reach the appropriate audience. Children's cartoon hours are filled with ads for toys and games. Why? Because the kids are watching. Websites for fishermen have ads for tackle, boats and bait by mail. The advertiser can be fairly certain that he is targeting an audience that has an interest in his product. But the Internet takes this one step farther. The advertiser seldom pays for their ad merely to appear. They pay per click. That means that they are only charged if a person sees their ad, decides that it is interesting, and then chooses to get more information on the advertised product. Compare this to television, where advertisers must pay to have the majority of viewers hit "mute," ignore the ad, or fail to be affected by it. In contrast, the Internet is a highly-powerful medium.
If a user chooses to visit, say, a maternity site, it may leave a calling card, known as a "cookie," on the users' computer system. When that user goes to, for example, a CD-sales website, that site can detect the cookie from the maternity site. It can then determine that it should place an ad, front and center, for a CD of lullabies for infants. This ad appears only to people who have previously visited those maternity sites. A search website could detect the same thing and have an ad for "Better Homes and Gardens" appear. That ad could link to sample articles and columns from the magazine and permit people to purchase a subscription immediately.
Doesn't this sound wonderful? Everybody wins -- the advertiser wastes no money and the consumer only sees relevant advertisements. But do we really want these intimate details of our lives to be available?
Let's pretend that I'm a database manager. I collect information from websites. There's a fellow named John Smith. John Smith is divorced, has three children, a cat, a dog, a large house in Silver Spring and collects Russian dolls. His address is 2984 Hayshed Lane, his phone number 410-730-6809. He is 35 years old. He went to Columbia University. He is white, 5'10" with black hair and brown eyes. He speaks French, has a large music collection, tends to overspend and usually considers purchases carefully. He stays up late into the night on the Internet, usually ignoring his e-mail. He instead browses the web, plays Quake and chats with strangers through his videophone.
I know all of this about him even though I've never met him. Exactly zero man hours have gone into learning this information. But should anybody need this, data along with pages upon pages of details on his day-to-day activities, a photo and a psychological profile of Mr. Smith, it could be generated in a few minutes. This type of data is available describing most any user of the Internet. If that's not disturbing enough, this information is also available on most anybody who does not use the Internet.
This leads to the obvious question: So what? To many people it doesn't matter that this information is freely available to others. But what if, say, the Silver Spring Police Department is looking for a serial mugger? He is about 5'10", has black hair, and brown eyes. He seems intelligent, well-educated and thoughtful. He speaks only French to his victims. "Gosh," thinks the Silver Spring Police Department, "let's check our files."
Though Mr. Smith has never been arrested, he's one of the few people that fit the profile. The others are ruled out. Mr. Smith, unable to come up with an alibi for any of the incidents, is arrested. Our friend Mr. Smith is innocent.
Could this happen? Certainly. The purpose of police files is to outline as many citizens as possible to determine who may have committed a crime. It benefits the police department and the citizens to have the most complete and current records that are available to them. Some cities have begun this already, notably the CD-ROM-based Megan's Law archives of convicted child molesters and rapists.
This is only a small slice of the pie. This information is far more valuable to marketing agencies, who can use it to target their ads with even more precision. If a Russian doll-making company came to an Internet marketing firm, they could buy a list of e-mail addresses of people who collect them. Those people did not give permission for their addresses to be used. Many of these people pay per minute for use of the Internet, so they are charged for the download of e-mail. Essentially, they are charged to receive unsolicited advertisements.
This is something that would be completely unacceptable while watching television, reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. But somehow it has become acceptable on the Internet. Mysteriously, advertisements that a user chooses to see are free.
Who designed all this? Herein lies the problem with the Internet: nobody did. The Internet is a hodge-podge of programs and interfaces, created by hundreds of people for thousands of different reasons. Often the program is intended for one reason and ultimately used for another. Then people complain that the program doesn't work appropriately for their purposes.
The Internet was never intended to be an advertising medium. The Internet, in fact, was largely designed on trust, making security and privacy more of an afterthought than anything else. Some advertisers use this to their advantage, which is how we end up with things like pay-per-view ads.
A new medium has appeared on the Internet. Traditionally the Internet has worked on an as-needed basis. If a user needs, for example, stock updates, then they go to an Internet site where they can get information on stocks. No longer. "Push" media is changing that. This new format pushes information to a user's system in the same manner that a television pushes data into a person's living room. The user can select a channel to receive data on, and these channels are broken up into topics. So somebody could choose to view the stock channel. This is not usually active and entertaining, as television strives to be, but it is constantly updating. Periodic stock updates running at the bottom of a screen is a type of push media. Breaking tour schedule information and MTV news popping up in a new window would also be an example of push media. It's an exciting, engaging technology that is what the Internet appears to be all about. But are our pockets being picked while we watch the monkey perform?
Push media makes advertising easier than ever. Ads come to a user's computer on their own, tagging along with the desired data. It is harder than ever to ignore, frequently incorporating sound and video, something missing from on-demand advertisements. This advertising is as targeted as any of the older Internet media, only more engaging, attractive and television-like than ever before.
Is this direct advertising better for America? It saves money, it saves time, and it makes consumers' lives a little easier and considerably more entertaining. Gathering mailing lists is nothing new for businesses, and is unlikely to be barred anytime soon. Businesses have been gathering consumers' names and addresses for decades to target mailings, and there have been few legal objections to that. Now they're gathering far more detailed information, but it all fits beneath the same legal umbrella as always. It is unlikely that there will be any significant legal challenges to this questionable use of technology.
As for now, people don't seem to mind very much. That's probably because they don't know what's going on. Even if they do hear the whisperings of conspiracy, they don't mind the tradeoff. It's easier to swallow this bitter pill if it is wrapped in tasty graphics and flavorful sound bites. Sure, people still allow many aspects of their lives to be probed and recorded by anonymous computers. But now it looks prettier.