Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy

Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Updating to Remain the Same: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. Here's how restrictions apply. Bogard , Professor of Sociology, Whitman College Elmer's study of profiling zeroes in on a key aspect of modern media spaces. Start reading Profiling Machines on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 2 reviews.

Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Greg Elmer pulls the veil off the universal practice of consumer profiling and data-collection, and demonstrates its deep societal influence. Daily, when you swipe a credit card or buy a magazine or go online, your personal habits are monitored - and someone will use that information to make a buck. Both in terms of its topic and its treatment, this book should be too theoretical to hold much interest for the business public. Who cares about communications theory as applied to the continual mapping of personal consumer information?

However, you can't push this into a dusty corner, because the subtle cultural effect of the increasingly close monitoring and data mining of consumer behavior is too powerful to overlook. While the book has a slightly dry, academic direction, we still strongly recommend it to those who are curious whether the juggernaut economic machine will steamroll over the privacy rights of those who use and feed it.

Elmer is a good writer and innovative thinker. He provides the reader with provacative insights on a subject little considered but worthy of greater attention. One person found this helpful. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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Getting it home merely requires a passport. P o l a r p a l o o z a 1 9 9 5 Molson USA requests that the general public refrain from any attempts to crash the party. We share in your enthusiasm for the event, but a personal journey to the Canadian Arctic would be unwise. You will have to win to get in. Crashing a party has never seemed so hazardous.

Trekking thousands of miles across the frozen tundra is clearly a dangerous endeavor, yet the above warning suggests that the American branch of the Canadian brewery Molson Inc. That Canadian contestants were outnumbered by their American counterparts approximately three to one , however, did not go unnoticed.

The Molson dynasty was henceforth built on the separation of French and English consumer markets, an ironic beginning, given the ongoing separist sentiments in the Canadian federation Woods , Recognizing the limits of sailing ships on the St. Profiles in Promotional Events Accompanying the phalanx of ice beers, Coors Lite was likewise promoted with images of snow-covered wilderness. Furthermore, the participants by their very size attempt to conquer the wilderness through ritualistic though rigorous play.

Viewers we are thus taken to the imaginary realm of the extreme. Its logo is inscribed in paint underneath NHL ice rinks across the United States in plain view of the players, fans, and television viewing audience. The star of the Molson concert was Courtney Love, singer for the band Hole and widow of the late rock icon Kurt Cobain. Safely reaching the ground despite bets to the contrary from some onlookers, the singer.

Moreover, the excessive sound, rhythm, and lifestyle linked the concert event to the social space that was produced by the rugged landscape and various cultural appendages, such as extreme sports. Whether on a rebate coupon, an entry form, or a Web page, Molson integrated its market research into a number of consumer practices.

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Profiles From beginning to end, then, the native people of Tuktoyaktuk were omnipresent, giving a human face to the North. A ten-hour live Internet cybercast was broadcast through the Molson Ice Web page, and reception of the cybercast, which was hosted by an MTV V-jay, thus required a computer, high-speed Internet access, and knowledge of online software such as RealPlayer.

Reception of the cybercast was also contingent on online membership at hhttp: Not surprisingly, enrollment required answering a host of demographic questions Booker Gordon , 9 As we see in this parody of beer advertising, nationality often plays an integral part in marketing culture. In the Canadian case, we have seen the extent to which Labatt and Molson fought over what they, as it turned out, rightly believed to be a powerful international symbol—ice. In keeping with similar trends in the tourism industry, Molson thus framed its leisure- or travel-based marketing event as an exclusive and authentic once-in-a-lifetime event surrounded by alcohol, loud music, extreme sports, and the extreme and mythic environment of the Canadian Arctic.

Through the many sites of solicitation, contest entrants and winners also played an active role in the shift toward target marketing As a relatively new and increasingly popular tactic, event marketing thus extends advertising appeals from the banal to the extreme, from the everyday to the once in a lifetime, from the core to the periphery and back. Events Deploying and advertising in increasingly segmented consumer markets. If the browser was dead, as Altena claimed, then why was a corporation like America Online so interested in acquiring Netscape?

Why would the U. The overwhelming popularity of Napster and a host of other similar peer-to-peer networks has also proven that the limits of the browser can be discussed in decidedly mass consumer terms. Nelson thus envisioned a hypertext program that enabled universal access and promoted a populist ideology, generalist knowledge, pluralist politics, and a consequent engagement with controversial and radical ideas. Bennington refers to this indexical characteristic as the process of designation, or the enabling of a particular course of events—in this instance, the connection to another Web document or site.

Web hyperlinks are therefore not merely a sign or metaphor, as semioticians like Charles Peirce conceive them. Rather as a deictic index, they actually enable the connectivity of the Web-as-index. After such decentered gateways to interdocument connectivity, association, and networking via hyperlinks were redesigned and formatted by Tim Berners-Lee and others for the Web as hypertext markup language , though, they still raised serious questions about usability.

How can a decentered document system with theoretically multiple entry and exit points hyperlinks be made workable? The popularity of such por- a Panoptic Medium Surveillance on the Web is a similar means of sorting and categorizing users and is enabled by a similar logic of connectivity, not of Search engines like Google are not constructed by simply following hyperlinks from document to document or from Web page to Web page. They also confer relevance and authority to Web sites based on the number of incoming links. With the help of the browser, the search engine—as a database of Web pages and sites—renders an indexical form of Web connectivity.

As a consequence, Web sites and pages are no longer atomized or decentralized. The most common spiders simply roam and mine the Internet for data. Search engines and portals, in other words, do not provide access to everything on the Web but rely on a host of strategies to construct selective representations of the Web. In addition to asking users to submit their sites for registration as Yahoo! According to Netcarta Corporation , 1 , the main producer of Internet mapping technologies, unlike how hyperlinks connect documents.

Web surveillance is largely concerned with facilitating reliable and continuous connections between users and largely commercial servers. In fact, one might argue that on the seemingly discontinuous Net, making connections and keeping them have become the primary commercial strategy.

Continuous computer-mediated communication via instant messaging programs, for example, has become a hotly competitive technology that Microsoft, Yahoo! E-tailers and other consumer-driven online Web sites initially viewed Internet users as a decidedly disconnected class and made periodic requests to large servers for content, services, and commodities.

The PC hard drive has become for most purposes the end node of the Net—the point at which personal information is continuously integrated into the medium of the Web. T r a c i n g t h e C o o k i e T r a i l Cookies have become one of the primary means of identifying individuals on the Web particularly for e-tailers and as such have become the source of much concern for privacy advocates worldwide. Privacy expert Roger A. As a whole, this study looked at user knowledge and control over cookie operations via the Web browser and the PC hard drive.

Its questions attempt to ascertain the degree to which Netscape encodes knowledge and control preferences for Web browser cookies. Findings from a brief follow-up study also shed light on the implications of having users actually change the default settings4 of their cookie operations when available. Simply put, cookies provide a relatively stable platform for interactions between users clients and Web site owners or servers. Cookies essentially provide servers and their owners a means of identifying repeat visitors to their Web sites, and in so doing they fundamentally challenge the ability of users to remain anonymous on the Net.

Department of Energy As cookies were used more widely by clients users and servers largely e-tailers but also government ,8 Netscape began to release new versions of its popular browser that provided additional information and options for controlling the use of cookies. Not surprisingly, the specter of an Orwellian World Wide Web was repeatedly raised by reporters and other critics of Netscape.

Advanced Accept all cookies, Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server, Do not accept cookies, Warn me before accepting a cookie, Default setting: Accept all cookies 6. The second column in table 6. Preferences is the term widely used in the computer software industry to refer to the options that users are given to change various software functions. Many software programs, including Netscape for Macintosh, use the label Preferences for their pull-down menus.

There is no one established list of options or preferences for all software. Some software programs provide few options for customization and adaptation to computing requirements. Preferences and similar control options thus shed light on the limits of software and the choices that are made in the process of producing software.

These boxes, circles, and other interactive buttons let users change the function of cookies. Cookies were operational in all version 1 and version 2 May browsers, but users were not able to manipulate their workings and were not even aware of their existence. Subsequently, the new cookie-enabled Internet as a networking of computers meant that personal computers and their accompanying hard drives were no longer personal.

Panoptic The last column—Information on Cookies—attempts to show the extent to which each version provides documentation on the workings of cookie technology. Even a lengthy reading of the Netscape Handbook version 1 , with its tutorial, reference guide, and index, reveals no mention of cookies or client-server states at all.

Typically, forms are used to give you a fast and easy way to make a request or send back a response regarding the page you are reading. A cookie is a piece of limited, internal information transmitted between server software and the Netscape application. The dialogs notify you before information is transmitted. The Netscape application displays the information and leaves the connection to the server open.

With an open connection, the server can continue to push updated pages for your screen to display on an ongoing basis. Although the Magic Cookie File remained in the same place as it had in previous versions, information on cookies was added to an expanded Netscape Handbook 3.

Moreover, such seemingly minor changes to the Netscape browser hint at the political debate over privacy and anonymity online and also point to the broadening use of cookie technology throughout the burgeoning Internet industry. To unearth the expansion of cookie technology, I visited a representative sample of Web sites that included two search engines MyExcite and MyYahoo! After the alert was received, both options— do not accept the cookie and accept the cookie—were tested.

Although the Netscape browser allowed users to control the storage of cookies on their hard drives, choosing to decline cookies blocked access to the aforementioned sites. In other words, if a user wanted the convenience of reading the New York Times, shopping online at Yahoo! You must configure your browser to accept cookies in order to shop at this merchant. Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server. Access allowed Access allowed Access allowed Access allowed B. Do not accept cookies. In order to access NYTimes. An error occurred setting your user cookie. Please enable your browser to accept cookies.

Warn me before accepting a cookie.

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The online advertising giant Doubleclick, for instance, partnered with a number of online Web sites to set individual server-addressed cookies from multiple remote sites. Visiting a page from a Doubleclick partner, regardless of its URL Web address , thus resulted in the storage of a Doubleclick cookie. Ironically, opting out was contingent on accepting a cookie from Doubleclick. Enable cookies for the originating Web site only. Warn me before storing a cookie. Moreover, such inconvenience would disproportionately fall on Netscape and its Web browser—especially when Web sites such as Yahoo!

This may be a good or a bad thing depending on what the site does with the information. It might be bad if the bookseller then sold that information to the local dog pound so they could cross-check for potential dog owners who do not have valid dog licenses. A browse through Amazon. Do you want to allow it? A user could not knowledgeably discriminate between one Web site cookie and another, particularly when bombarded with requests from page to page. The cookie manager in Netscape version 6.

Advertisers use it to determine the timing and placement of ads to reach the widest segment of selected audiences. Not surprisingly, social fears of the unknown were also heightened throughout the year by uncertainties over how computers would react on December The apocalypse that might be triggered by the new millennium was not a moral disaster but a technological crisis for information networks. What the new millennium therefore potentially brings is a systematic, automated corruption of the networks of information—bugs, viruses, and outdated chips that can disable the simplest tasks of everyday life.

Consequently, his main characters are developed largely through their relationships to the production and utility of simulated pictures of probable social, political, and criminal transgressors. Kreizler, notes Carr , Circumstantial evidence will be sparse at best—he has been at work for years, after all, and has had more than enough time to perfect his technique. What we must do—the only thing that can be done—is to paint an imaginary picture of the sort of person that might commit such acts. We might reduce the haystack in which our needle hides to something more like a—a pile of straw, if you will.

An implicit theme in many if not all of the previous chapters has been the questioning of strictly visual critiques of consumer culture. Consumption and production in databases and on the Internet remain uncharted. What is missing from the frame becomes underrepresented. The Culture, Media, and Identities series of books written or edited by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, and others from the Open University in the United Kingdom, for example Sage Publications, — , has attempted to broaden the scope of cultural methodologies and the binary producerconsumer model. On the question of politics, such a model probably would emphasize the importance of democracy and space.

Remember that this is a circuit. It does not much matter where on the circuit you start, as you have to go the whole way round before your study is complete. What is more, each part of the circuit is taken up and reappears in the next part, that is, of how Identities are constructed. We have separated these parts of the circuit into distinct sections, but in the real world they continually overlap and intertwine in complex and contingent ways.

1. Die Oppositionsbewegung in der DDR - grün und alternativ? (German Edition).
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In other words, as consumers, citizens, parents, children, members of various ethnic groups, and so on we are represented or misrepresented in and through texts, and we are actively solicited for our opinions, likes, wants, and desires in the process of rationalizing and revising various elements of sales, distribution, advertising, and marketing. S p a t i a l R o u t i n e s a n d E v e r y d a y H a b i t s To locate potential sites of political struggle, we must determine the sites at which we enter or engage particular systems of power and discrimination, and for this reason, I have consistently returned to questions of space.

Ironically, discussions of the popular, micropolitical dimensions of everyday life have been largely devoid of any topographical elements. P o l i t i c s b y D e f a u l t Instead of replacing or dismissing the importance of ideological and textual critiques of capitalism, hegemony, governmentality, and consumer culture, in this book I have attempted to highlight the manner in which individuals have become an integral part of the reproduction of consumer markets—through mediated texts in cyberspace and through everyday consumer purchases, queries, rentals, and exchanges.

As a consequence, consumer behavior, lifestyles, choices, likes, and dislikes all inform the subsequent production, advertisement, marketing, promotion, and sales of products and services. Whether at a point of sale or at a click on another hypertextual link, the attempt to accumulate information from individuals often relies on a default or otherwise coercive system of automation—the aforementioned rewards and punishments. Computer users, for instance, receive or download their browser applications with their cookies activated by default.

The recent antitrust cases brought by the Federal Trade Commission against both Microsoft and Intel are good examples of possible political interventions in a computerized default market that automates and encodes preferred choices for its users. Such exchanges, again, are built on technological systems that by default require consumers to provide personal information.

By recording every twist of the dial, every minute of the day and night, the audimeter obtains precious radio data not available through any other means. Ethical and social values quite to one side, an instrument of this sort chimes with a good many other facts of our world. It is obviously the commercial counterpart of the secret microphone installed for political reasons.

It is the mechanical sleuth which eventually pieces together the radio habits of a household into a single chart-image. It gives the inside story, which is typical of X-ray photographs, boudoir journalism, and cubist painting alike. For, as in cubist painting, the spectator is placed in the center of the picture. McLuhan, the quintessential techno-guru, provides yet another example of market research that has implications far beyond the switch, dial, or television remote control. It reminds us that such techniques collect very personal information within a space widely respected as being private.

The audimeter is also a technology without an end: Finally, the listener is placed front and center within the picture. Moreover, they go beyond attempting to control the quotidian whether markets or populations by also attempting to account for the future—probable outcomes, relationships, choices, wants, desires, places, and spaces. As a consequence, media and cultural criticism must begin to challenge not only dominant words, images, and texts but also the techniques and technologies that prescribe, regulate, and provide access to and control over political, economic, and cultural forms of power.

Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine In an attempt to discuss the fundamental elements of cybernetic systems, Wiener , turned to the example of the railroad: It is true that the signalman is not altogether a free agent; that his switches and signals are interlocked, either mechani- NOTES cally or electrically; and that he is not free to choose some of the more disastrous combinations. There are, however, feed-back chains in which no human element intervenes. The ordinary thermostat by which we regulate the heating of a house is one of these.

Nevertheless, Jean Baudrillard , 1 also recognizes the topographic functions of simulations: Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.

Elmer a and for analyses of Web cookies. Although there were no reports of such lengthy expeditions, a documentary of the event, Invasion of the Beer People directed by Albert Nerenberg and produced by George Hargrave for CBC Newsworld , recorded interviews with a number of party crashers who did make their way by various means to the site of the concert.

A study from Jupiter Media Metrix indicates that almost 70 percent of U. The problematic of anonymous online identities was a central question of many early studies of computer-mediated communication. Any Internet connection that uses a dial-up telephone connection has a random IP address assigned to the user for the duration of the connection. In contrast to Netscape, Internet Explorer 4.

See the Jupiter Media Metrix top 50 Web site rating reports at hhttp: More advanced users, however, hardly receive preferential treatment. Those experts were therefore known as alienists. These law enforcement practices soon spread to train stations and bus terminals, as well. Did the person appear to be nervous? Did he pay for his airline ticket in cash and in large bills?

Was he going to or arriving from a destination considered a place of origin of cocaine, heroin or marijuana? Was he traveling under an alias? The Department of Justice has since reached an out-of-court agreement with Intel. Boston Globe, October 22, A The Census in History. A Dialogue with Harold A. The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 7 1.

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