Intellitactics Asks Will Privacy Disappear Like Vinyl Records?

It may be hard to believe but Intellitactics' Sunil Bhargava has finally taken a vacation - he's at a hidden location in the Mediterranean with his family absorbing the culture of the ages. In his absence, we asked Warren Axelrod to share an observation on the disappearance of privacy.

 

From the desk of Warren Axelrod: More than a dozen years ago, I was a big advocate of data mining and analysis using OLAP (on-line analytical processing) to sieve through huge databases and summarize the results to be used as “business information”.  I published two articles about data mining and OLAP in Wall Street & Technology magazine. The first was published in the July 1996 issue and has the title “Real-time Decisions, Anywhere, Anytime.” It touted the advances in technology, particularly access via the Internet, as enablers for employees to analyze their companies’ data remotely. The second article, published in December 1996, had the title “Cashing in on Data Mining” and covered the use of data mining and OLAP to discover patterns that would predict trends in generic “customer” behavior. Back in the day, data mining was concerned with data in aggregate for examining patterns and associations at the macro level.  

  

Now there is nothing macro about data mining. A July, 2009 article in the The New York Times by Stephanie Clifford, “Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal”,  caught my eye. The article explains how the mega- data gathering and data mining companies, such as the Acxiom and Experian, provide detailed personal information on request. They gather and analyze publicly available information such as the details from warranty cards, magazine subscriptions, etc. Axciom purportedly has “15,000 pieces of data on every American …” These companies can (for a fee) provide detailed reports, including names and addresses of individuals who conform to a set of criteria which the requestor specifies. What causes concern on my part is that Acxiom was a victim of two data breaches, one in 2003 and another in 2004 (neither mentioned in the NYT article), 

 

The lesson here is that technologies and procedures frequently evolve from the benign to the dangerous. Knowing the spending pattern of a group of 100,000 persons is one thing; knowing how you or knowing how I spend money is quite another thing. There is clearly marketing value in both, but the latter exposes us all to what might be considered an invasion of our collected privacy in a way that is seemingly quite legal. Maybe it’s just the way I look at the world, but don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to have financial firms assiduously protect non-public personal information, while much of the same information is available for a price from the Acxioms of the world? I guess private is becoming a relative term.