Tuesday November 23, 2004 – The Information Age Exacts a Cost

Tuesday November 23, 2004 – The Information Age Exacts a Cost

When I was born, my first recollections were of a small farm in Brooklyn, Mississippi. I remember going to a school that was next to the church my family would attend on Sunday. I’ve been meaning to write to the Department of Education in Forrest County, where the small town of Brooklyn is, to ask for my school records. I’m willing to bet they don’t have them. The school I attended and the Baptist church across the road, where most of my relatives on my father’s side are buried have long since been abandoned. My record of where they lay to rest have been captured by recorders who locate graveyards and collect and publish the wording on head stones within each. I have such a recording of the cemetery adjacent to St. Johns Baptist Church. Theirs were anonymous lives whose secrets lie buried with them.

In this modern world, the very secrets that rest securely with the departed are increasingly becoming part of a public/private record. And I’m becoming concerned about how much of this information exists on all of us today. You could argue that the collected information on each of us enables the information holders to have a more personal relationship with us. The grocery store clerk can call you by your first name, the barber shop where I go to get a hair cut can ask me if I want the same haircut I had the last time and describe the instructions I gave back then, though the young woman barber attending to me was not the one who cut my hair before. It is rare that I recognize the barber that attends to me when I sit in the barber chair, but each of them know how I’ve cut my hair in the past and probably how often I come into the shop.

The grocery store, with its club card customer loyalty program, knows what I and my wife “I” purchase on a regular basis no matter the store we’re in. I can see the chain’s motives implementing the program; they get to achieve customer loyalty by giving you a discount on certain goods. In return you provide a record to the store of everything you buy and how often you come in. A smart statistical analysis program running on a compute farm in the grocery chain’s main IT (information technology) center can better stock the stores you shop in with goods you most often buy. In fact, the program has the capability equivalent to the one used by the weather service to forecast weather.

Credit card companies have similar programs that examine your historical purchasing patterns and make determination about the probability that someone has taken your card and is going on a shopping spree. A case in point occurred at the start of the year. I made my first ever trip to Taiwan in February. I upgraded my economy seat to one with slightly more legroom and used my AMEX card to pay for the transaction at SFO. Once in Taiwan, I charged my hotel stay in Taipei and Hsin Chu on the same card. A month and a half later I returned to Taiwan and charged an amount ten times the maximum I’ve ever charged on the card—it was for a seminar my company held at the Hsin Chu hotel where I had stayed during my previous trip. The charge went through as soon as the hotel entered the card number. I can only assume that the fraud program was well aware of my spending habits and places I had stayed in recent weeks to determine that the rather large charge was not fraudulent. I suspect that AMEX program knows more about what I’ve done over the last 30 years than most of my closest family and friends.

And if the program knows, any human with access to that program who wants to know can get the program to tell it everything. The program is like that friend of yours you’ve sworn to secrecy with the most intimate details of your life and he or she only tells one or two of his or her closest friends. The tens of millions of adults in this country, whether they realize it or not, are now living in a small village where your business is known. Your most intimate secrets are known: the type of birth control devices you purchase, the medications you’re on—this is a far better indicator of your health than even your medical record, the type of movies you watch, the magazines you subscribe to, how much and what kind of alcoholic beverages you consume, and if you have a wireless toll collection transponder, who you’ve called—how often and for how long, where you’ve driven in the local community on any given day of the month—though this does assume you traverse a bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The state of California is now proposing to charge motorists by the mile driven rather than by the amount of gas consumed. More fuel-efficient automobiles are eating into the state’s revenues. The technology is relatively easy to implement. In the crudest form, each motorist would be issued a transponder not unlike the one used to collect tolls and the state would simply install transmitter-receivers at intervals along any major thoroughfare—the freeways first, and at each interchange. Then every month or every quarter, the state would issue a bill based on the amount of miles recorded to your transponder. The great civil liberties problem is that the state could essentially know where every motorist of the state is at any given time: a great tool for law enforcement but hell on people who are engaging in any kind of lawful activity in which they would like to keep their whereabouts private—the merger of two large corporations or an illicit (not illegal) extramarital affair.

I’ve tried to resist all these attempts to collect information on me. When I purchase wine, I pay in cash and I shop where they have no loyalty program that identifies me. I don’t have a wireless toll collection device, though there have been times I would have killed for one. I’ve not filled prescriptions—especially for pain killers—my doctor and dentist have given me—they feel obliged to write a prescription to justify their time with me. However, I’m running out of ways to resist the collective efforts to build an electronic record of my daily activity. I have no doubt that information gleaners will overtake me completely if that hasn’t already occurred.