Are we being tracked?

Great Debates
41

@Chihuahua, if you want to take the business school viewpoint on all of this, you’re welcome to do so. Just remember that Econ 101, and indeed all of econ and business, is taught from the perspective of commerce - exclusively, until some postgrad investigations. The unconsidered bias runs right to bedrock.

The issue isn’t CS receipt surveys (as in this and a couple of parallel threads). It’s not pricing shenanigans like shelf news. It’s not loyalty or membership cards. Those are all pebbles in the avalanche, and about the limit of what we can discuss effectively in this medium. As I said in other recent threads, I don’t get drawn into multiple topics in a single thread because 30 years of experience has taught me it ends up being a waste of time. Like the last Doper who worked himself into a rage over my refusal to chase his topics, you’re welcome to start a thread for any reasonably compact aspect of this or of “radical consumer economics” in general, if you like.

I’ll answer all your questions above with this: Tracking is increasingly prevalent and at the major-player level goes far beyond the store and what its management decides to stock on the shelves. It goes all the way back to major conglomerate marketing departments, independent marketing agencies and data aggregators like Google and Acxiom. It’s used to build extremely detailed portraits of us as individuals - not as faceless sheeples, but as identifiable individuals. In past eras this would have resulted in warehouses of essentially useless data because the mining and interpretation tools were too feeble - picks and shovels. With big data, it’s more like those massive coal-mining borers - the data evaluation that can be done is of an almost unimaginable scale, and produces results unobtainable a few years ago.

These results are the mother lode for marketing, and they are used to shape a good part of our world, since we are a consumption-driven culture. They are not being used to shape it for our convenience or comfort or desires… but to maximize the profits of those doing the shaping. That is NOT the same thing as “giving customers what they want” by any stretch of the imagination; it’s finding only the most profitable options at any level, and consumer choice and individual economic freedom are being sacrificed on that altar of greed to a vastly greater degree than any prior era. If “choice” and “freedom” and “independence” as a consumer are of any value to you, you’re looking at things in entirely the wrong way… but it’s exactly the way the consumer goods industry has conditioned you to see it.

Shop in all good health.
There isn’t any way to make the whole argument fit in this teeny one-ounce sack, so if you don’t want to discuss it one piece at a time, you’ll have to go join the ragers in the Pit. Just for reference, the principal statement of the thesis is at 125,000 words and still has a little ways to go.

Or stay with the Business 101 verities all you like. I really don’t mind. :slight_smile:

42

“Marketing is only legal because it doesn’t work most of the time.”
-Dilbert

Yes, you are being tracked:
-Your cell phone GPS
-Your internet history
-The server logs at all the web sites you visit
-All your emails
-Every time you swipe your credit card
-All your personal information stored at any financial or healthcare organization you deal with
-Your EZPass or other automated toll sensors
-Transit passes
-CCTVs

And the greatest minds of our day are conspiring with big business to use this information to sell you tacos wrapped in burritos wrapped in pizza.

43

Unfortunately, not true, except in the sense that any individual marketing effort may bring expected results or not. In the aggregate, “marketing” has probably shaped our present world more than any other force. At all.

But marketing loves to be made fun of and thus minimalized and misunderstood.

44

OK, that makes it all worth it. Mmmm, Tacos wrapped in Burritos wrapped in Pizza…

45

Of course the grocery store (and the phone company and the EZ Pass system and Google and everyone else tracking us) is doing it because it’ll profit them in some way or another. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to hurt us. The economy is not a zero-sum game. It’s quite possible, likely even, that the same measures those companies are taking to increase their profits will also, in the process, make things cheaper and/or more convenient for us.

Hypothetical example: Suppose that I’m looking for a new car. And suppose that what’s most important to me is that the car be highly reliable, and that it have a lot of cargo capacity. I don’t much care about mileage or number of passengers or position of cupholders. In the pre-tracking era, every car company would be sending me ads trying to sell all of their models, by talking up all of their features. These ads mostly just annoy me, because they’re mostly telling me about things that I don’t care about, and they’re costing the car companies money, and they’re not likely to get any of that money back because I’m probably not going to buy any of their stupid high-efficiency six-passenger cars without a trunk.

But now, introduce Big Data. Now, the car companies can tell, from my patterns of other purchases and whatever other data they have, what I want in a car. So now, the car companies that do have reliable vehicles with lots of cargo space will send me ads just for those particular models, and the ads will brag about those two points. They’re much more likely to sell me a car, so they’re happy. I’m much more likely to end up with a car that meets my needs, so I’m happy. And even the other car companies that don’t have a car that I’d like at least save the cost of futile advertisements, so they’re at least a little bit happy. We all win.

And the cost of this win-win is that I have a little less privacy. Well, what’s that to me? How does it actually hurt me, that some big company knows what kinds of cars that I like? Even if the Big Data really does turn up embarrassing things about me, the big companies aren’t going to care about that: Probably that embarrassing info is never going to be seen by anyone but some computer, and even if a human does see it, I’ll probably never even meet that human.

46

You’re taking a very simplistic view of tracking and data mining and the resulting data analysis, and you’re sticking with the idea that manufacturers’ goal is to “make a product you want.” This is, of course, the notion that the consumer goods industries have gone to much trouble to foster and promote, and it may well have been true at some time, and still true in some places. The idea that Nestle or Ford or Sony is quizzing us at length to make sure they sell what we want is charming, but absolutely unconnected to reality.

The megacorps that produce the vast bulk of our goods want to optimize their wares so that people will buy them at the highest price possible, which may sound like the same thing but is really at some odds to the kindlier thought. They want to take the list of seventy-five ice cream flavors and create a carefully-optimized selection of six that addresses the widest spectrum. No blueberry, but “triple berry.” No caramel, but “dulce du leche.” And so forth until they have found the optimal spot to get some very large percentage of the market to be able to find an acceptable flavor - but not the one they “wanted.” (Which will then be priced similarly - at a point probably a little higher than some majority of buyers would like, but one they know won’t bar the sale.)

It’s not about “making products we want” - it’s about “making products we can be induced to buy.” Not the same thing at all, on any level.

The purpose of tracking and data mining and so forth is not, and has not ever, been to make sure all potential customers are served. The purpose of this activity is, and always has been, to develop the *least *product that can be delivered for the *highest *price. Not sorta-kinda, but to a theoretically maximized and continually optimized point, which the tools allow them to do with greater and greater precision. It’s going to result in greatly reduced consumer choice, across the board, and rising costs, and even further erosion of personal financial stability as they map the weak points of our resistance with greater and greater accuracy, and for surprisingly small divisions of population.

Put another way, we are not at a “more of the same, only it’s 2016” point. We are at the beginning of the “Aha, gotcha, ya little bastards” point.

If you choose to think it’s all benign and will ultimately serve your wishes, I probably can’t convince you any differently, at least not through this narrow pipeline. But it doesn’t take much thought, outside the carefully conditioned box, to realize that they don’t give a shit about giving you a car that is all wonderful things. Their objective is the *least *car they can sell you (in part because other choices have been eliminated) that you’ll pay the highest price for, and nothing else.

Right now, most of us are in a flimsy cardboard box we chose to climb into. That box is already getting stronger, and smaller, and less avoidable even for those who thing they’ve never been boxed in their lives. And far too many people sit smugly telling themselves it’s just a wonderful box. All the ads told them so.

47

My reply is to Mr Amatuer, you were called out early in this thread and you delivered. I have to believe you know what you are talking about. I have seen some of the results of what you have posted about, Wal-mart being one of them. Less choices in what I want! I have to say that I don’t believe all stores are participating though, and they do have the discount cards. How is this for my first post on The Dope?

48

I’m good with it. :slight_smile:

This is a frustrating topic to deal with in narrow slices, as any one topic sounds somewhere between unlikely and completely batshit. You have to grasp two or three contrary notions before it begins to make sense. The most primary of those is getting over the (carefully fostered and maintained) idea that consumer goods marketing is some kind of benign clown, waving balloons and puppies to get you to look at its wares, and can be dismissed or ignored by anyone who chooses to. Take what it’s doing seriously - and it’s very serious - and the other pieces begin to make sense.

But ever’body likes clowns and puppies and balloons, right? :slight_smile:

49

AB, I’m really making an effort here to understand what you’re saying, but you offer little to no cites, nor do I see much evidence at the stores I visit to corroborate what you’re going on about.

It’s not that I don’t think a shit-ton of data is being collected and massaged in ways never before possible, I’m just not seeing whatever it is your conclusion is.

50

Well grocery stats was not really what I planned this to be about…but oh well, most all threads drift

Good for the first laugh of the day…thanks! :smiley: “They” are whoever they want to be!

All that and on the terrorism continues …:eek::eek:

I take that as an insult, I am not a member of the Tin Foil Hat Brigade! :smiley:

Just wondering what you all think of the topic…:smiley:

Doesnt work that way in the grocery store I peruse…the get rid of the things we buy regularly. Most recent thing is Hungry Jack Complete Buttermilk pancake mix. Ya only add water to the mix. Course they cut their two sections of all foods related to pancakes to one section and increased all the snack-“health” bars of the world to replace the space.

I dont have too much concern about all the tracking anywhere, I am very well aware of it. Not that I have been online for as many as you are, I only joined in 2000.

Again, just wondering what the future brings us in the world of tracking us.

We pass by each other at whatever speed and the cops are strictly looking to see if the safety belts are in place??

Civil liberties "pfff’ Not the topic at all :dubious:

Topic is: Is this the future? Maybe I did not word it correctly.

Can we expect to be found at any second of the day by “whoever” with all the tracking there is presently or in the future?

51

A shit-ton of data on consumer activity is being collected… by private companies, both manufacturing-related and those specifically in the highest reaches of marketing data collection and analysis. They answer to no one. There is no review or oversight, and because they directly and indirectly control the sources of the data, there are few if any restrictions on their activities.

This data is not accessible outside the companies except to paying clients, and then only selectively. They have years and years of tracking data on you - on fairly private and intimate aspects of your life - that the NSA and other governmental agencies, whose hands are nominally tied by civil liberties, can only dream about.

If, on the simplest level, this level of data collection doesn’t make your privacy and personal-liberty detectors quiver, then the other arguments probably won’t interest you. If you think it’s okay that these companies essentially have a map of your consciousness on file and can “query” it to see how you might respond to various marketing efforts - like an FBI profiler who has cases of data on details of your life - then I understand why you’re confused.

But if you’re meh about it, remember that this massive data collection, analysis and application is to the single end of finding ever-more-efficient ways to extract money from you - you as a general consumer, and you as an individual.

If you’re going to meh again because corporations gotta profit… no further arguments to add that would advance understanding. If you’re okay with your role as an element that feeds corporate profit and are willing to be passive about how they manage that process - feel free to put me on your ignore list.

WildBlueYonder, this isn’t the future - it’s the now. The future will be worse.

52

I love puppies and balloons, but clowns are fucking evil.

53

He gets it. :slight_smile:

54

Would you admit that it is possible for both buyer and seller to benefit mutually from some action or another?

Like this:

55

Of course. And, setting aside a greater viewpoint, it’s probably still the case for most smaller merchants. At no point do I mean to imply that all commerce is somehow underhanded and abusive of the consumer.

The majority of what I’m talking about is the practices of the national corporations and larger entities that produce consumer goods, and all those who bend to their will and/or willingly hitch their cash register to their train. Including smaller tiers that knowingly ape the practices of the giants, we’re probably talking about 75% or more of the consumer goods sold in the US.

But if anyone is reading this as applying the apple you buy from a local fruitstand, or most consumer interactions with small and necessity merchants (large chain grocery stores being the notable exception there, since they are so universal) - if anyone thinks I’ve meant that level of consumer commerce, I’ve either written poorly or been deliberately misunderstood for effect.

56

Let me see if I can answer a number of reasonable questions in one sweep.

I am not anti-capitalism. I am not anti-profit. I am not anti-wealth. I am not anti-commerce. I am not even wholly anti-marketing/-advertising. I think there are reasonable limits on all those things and my idea of reasonable may not be yours - but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of those economic elements.

What I am, in one word, is anti-exploitation. The evidence that marketing as done by the nationals, internationals and megas long ago went past kindly inducement to buy or proffer of product, even went past manipulative to exploitative… and I’m only up to about the 1970s. The manipulation and exploitation goes well beyond the laudable virtues of making money or making a profit or even making a profit to make money for shareholders - it’s a national and global practice to extract as much wealth from the various populations as possible, and, increasingly, at any social, economic and ecological cost.

The evidence is all around us, if you only take the time to look. We didn’t end up in this light-speed, superheated global economy that cannot withstand the slightest faltering of consumer spending (== slight increases in savings, even) from simple expansion of Smith’s economic notions. We were pushed here, hard, by entities seeking only to extract wealth on the most extreme scale.

I think it’s time to push back. And the push-points and goals I see are contrary to most linear economic analysis, which is just too bad for the economics as she is indoctrinated. :slight_smile:

57

A question like “Are they tracking you?” is far too nebulous to either define the issue or suggest useful approaches for dealing with it.

Breaking it down to bite-sized chunks is more useful. A couple of examples:

  1. “Are hackers/corporations/Feds reading your email?” Probably not, but possibly. If you really want to be sure your messages are private you can encrypt them (though the existence and destination of the message is still detectable).

  2. “Are corporations profiling you?” Probably; you can reduce your footprint by avoiding things like loyalty cards, subscriptions, etc.

58

True, and this thread has changed direction at least once. The OP seemed to be more concerned with physical tracking, which didn’t seem to need much discussion, as of course all smartphones are tracked closely as part of how the system works. (And a lot of apps retrieve that location information and do nebulous things with it, but we’ll let that slide for now.)

Reduce to some extent; less than in the recent past. It is next to impossible to function in the modern world without generating copious amounts of tracking data. You can reduce some of what is individually identifiable, but not chunks of otherwise anonymous information (which is still useful for consumer targeting and market modeling).

59

Still not seeing any actual harm occurring, all the conspiracy lizard people notwithstanding. In any event, for any loyalty card I’ve seen there is no identity verification. I generally give all false data anyways. And even more often, I’ll use the “store card” that cashiers keep for people who forgot theirs. Again, not seeing any harm here.

60

Let’s assume that I’m is concerned about this. What can I do about this tracking and targeting?