We're trying to develop processing frameworks that would allow this data to be useful and to be used, without the somewhat creepy feeling that you’re constantly being watched.
- Richard Mortier
It’s a fact of modern life – with every click, every tweet, every Facebook Like, we hand over information about ourselves to organisations who are desperate to know all of our secrets, in the hope that those secrets can be used to sell us something.
Companies have been collecting every possible scrap of information from their customers since long before the internet age, but with more powerful computers, cheaper storage and ubiquitous online use, the methods organisations use to gather information about people have become ever-more sophisticated. And sometimes those organisations know us better than our own families or friends.
For example, several years ago, data analysis tools used by the US retailer Target had become so precise that they were able to determine, with astonishing accuracy, whether a woman was pregnant and how far along she was, based on her purchase of certain products. And in one particularly embarrassing incident, Target knew that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, much to her father’s displeasure.
“What Target learned from that incident is that marketing too accurately can really make people squeamish,” says Professor Jon Crowcroft of the University’s Computer Laboratory. “But if they made their marketing a little less accurate by increasing the amount of privacy they give their customers, they found they can still retain or increase their customer base without making people feel as if they’re being spied on.”
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Image: Eye
Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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