Businesses Spying on Consumers

by Rebecca St. Martin on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 2:26pm

I have noticed lots of hype in the news going on about "businesses using the Internet to spy on consumers." Here's one such article, entitled "The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets" by Julia Angwin:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html

This negative portrayal of what data-gathering businesses do just plain ticks me off. 

"Spying" suggests that there is confidential, personal information that's being used -- more importantly, used against consumers for duplicitous purposes. In reality, businesses are not interested in individuals -- they are interested in markets. 

What Angwin describes in her article is what businesses have been doing forever: gathering aggregate data so that they may display more appropriate ads, deliver more interesting opportunities to their audience (market segment) and hopefully, generate more happy customers and become profitable from it. It just so happens that there are newer, faster ways of doing this. 

Sadly, the effectiveness of using aggregate statistics from web-based applications remains to be seen, but it's innovative -- not intrusive. Web sites visitors "put out there" what they choose. If they have a problem with how their "data" is being "used," then they can choose to stop participating.

Learn more about the concepts:

Market Segmentation
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing#Market_segmentation

Aggregate Data / Aggregate Statistics
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1674995_1683300,00.html?cnn=yes

Usefulness of Aggregate Data
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http://jaxn.org/article/the-usefulness-of-aggregate-statistics