How They Scored

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D

Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...

This story on wired.com , about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored. The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days. There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I rea...

This is just the kind of thing I wrote about in my book: Microsoft ponders offline profiling of Web users By John Letzing, MarketWatch Last update: 7:02 p.m. EST Jan. 23, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Corp. is developing a method of using personal data such as credit-card information to target Internet users with advertising once they connect to the Web, according to a patent application filed by the company. In an application disclosed earlier this month, a Microsoft team including Chairman Bill Gates presents a method of collecting information about users' "cell phones, geolocation systems, credit-card information" and other data sources to select and display "targeted advertising." The technology described in the patent application touches on a delicate issue for Microsoft and other online companies such as Google Inc. Microsoft and its rivals have all sought to gather increasing amounts of personal information about Internet users to deliver...

From a NYT column on advertising and marketing by Christopher Caldwell : In early November, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, rolled out an advertising program called Beacon. It would track users onto the sites of Facebook's commercial partners -- Coca-Cola, the N.B.A., The New York Times and Verizon, among others -- and keep their friends posted about what they were doing and buying there. Did it ever. A Massachusetts man bought a diamond ring for Christmas for his wife from overstock.com and saw his discounted purchase announced to 720 people in his online network. What if it hadn't been for his wife? What if he had been buying acne cream? Pornography? A toupee? You could go on. Researchers at Computer Associates, an information-technology firm, discovered that Beacon was more invasive than announced. MoveOn.org started a petition movement against Beacon that rallied 75,000 Facebook subscribers. ... The Beacon fiasco gives a good outline of what future confl...