GELFAND’S WORLD-A couple of years ago, a father discovered that his teenage daughter was pregnant, but he only found out because of mailed advertisements she was getting from Target Stores. The dad was outraged that Target would even suggest such a thing, until he discovered that Target was right, and he himself hadn't known. How did Target know? It turns out that large American corporations not only track what you buy, they correlate your purchases with things like pregnancy.
The story was summarized in Forbes based on a truly chilling investigation that was published in the New York Times.
Who owns your personal secrets? Should a marketing research office in Target be allowed to sift through your credit card purchases to get information about your personal life? Should it be allowed to sell your secrets? Think about this. Should a company like Target even be allowed to do the kind of data mining on its own customers that led to the embarrassing pregnancy revelation?
Should a search engine company such as Google have the right to analyze your searches in order to direct ads to your screen? Amazon?
The Target and Google questions are not strictly identical, but there is a certain similarity.
These are questions that are routinely asked, but almost never answered correctly by the political sector. The answers are obvious, and if I may be allowed a little editorializing here, it's that you ought to own your own data, and any company that wants to sell data about you should be required to get your permission.
And in regard to a company like Target evaluating its own private collection of data, how could this be regulated? I think that this question is not quite as difficult as it sounds, and that there is an answer.
I recently was chatting with a colleague, and it was from him that this topic arose. I'll summarize his views, which can be paraphrased in a few words: "My data belongs to me; data mining has become an evil and we need a political movement to put it under control, and make our data our own, to sell or not sell as we choose."
Perhaps I'll be considered a little naive in this era of the NSA, credit cards, and widespread video surveillance. After all, it's still possible to survive at a subsistence level using cash and coins. I don't think that this is a very good answer. It may be the view of what I call the Corporate Libertarians, that is, the folks who defend the rights of corporations to do whatever they want.
In addition, the Googles of the world will argue that you are giving up your data as the price of using their online systems for free, and you can take it or leave it as you choose. That, by the way, is one reason I've never signed up on Facebook. I've just never wanted to take the time to learn their system of personal privacy and how to protect my own.
I think that it's possible to disagree with the Corporate Libertarian view without disabling the world's economy. Some level of regulation is reasonable, and the only level of authority able to regulate corporations is at the governmental level. We take for granted that the government can regulate issues like what additives can be put into your gasoline. Lead is no longer one of them. If the government can define a minimum wage and worker safety rules, then it certainly can define a level of control over a company like Target in terms of sifting through your secrets.
Just to take one possible example, suppose the government were to tell Target and other corporations that if they want to mine your data, then they have to let you know in advance. It would be analogous to the warnings on over the counter drugs. "This corporation may at its discretion try to figure out whether you have a sexually transmitted disease, whether you are overweight, or whether you are expecting."
It's what's next that is important. The warning should go on to say that Target can only do this if you opt in. It cannot be the default that Target can sift through your figurative laundry without warning you. Not only that, but in order to search through your life, the corporation should be required to obtain some affirmative communication from you, such as a signed form.
There is an obvious example of just such a regulation, one that is enforced and generally honored. You may recall that a few years ago, your doctor's office asked you to sign a form attesting to the fact that you had been advised as to your privacy rights. You may also have signed a form that gives permission for the doctor's office to provide information to your health insurance provider. This is a tangible exercise of patient protection.
Not too long ago, the UCLA medical center detected the fact that a few employees had been looking into the computer records of some of the more famous patients. Whether the motive was simple curiosity or the intent to sell patient information to one of the tabloids, the result was a major scandal, lots of newspaper stories, and ultimately the disciplining of those at fault.
In the case of medical records held by a hospital or doctor, your right to privacy is legally required. Hospitals and medical doctors are in a profession that is subject to fairly comprehensive regulation both at the state and federal levels. In practice, your health insurance company gets to learn a lot about you, but imagine if that insurance company could make a little money on the side by selling your medical secrets to any outside company? That's analogous to what Target and other large American corporations have been doing with your purchase data.
Maybe your credit card purchase doesn't say "obese diabetic with a drinking problem," but think about how this information would be handled by your doctor as opposed to the store that sold you sugar-free snacks, a bottle of gin, and a book on losing weight.
By the way, if you haven't yet read either the Forbes article or the New York Times story linked at the top of this page (which you should do), you may wonder how a teen pregnancy can be detected by Target based on purchase information (and without obvious indications such as the purchase of diapers). It turns out that a statistician at the company was actually asked to find leads to early indications of pregnancy, since the second trimester is apparently a good time to get parents into the habit of buying at Target. The statistician worked back from known baby gift registries and found correlations with purchases such as unscented hand cream.
Maybe it's not too surprising, but it is creepy.
Perhaps there should be a new law that requires all the Targets and other such peeping Toms to post a sign that every shopper will see, saying, "If you buy anything with something other than cash, we will know more about you than you ever imagined."
So why don't we have laws protecting consumer privacy right now? I suspect that the first reason involves the fact that people really didn't know much about the problem until recently. The other reason is, of course, the fact that the US Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of companies like Walmart and Target. After all, they also get away with treating their employees like dirt, but that's a different story that also needs more coverage.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 39
Pub: May 13, 2014
