[comp.org.eff.talk] <None>

sean@dranet.dra.com (04/12/91)

In article <CE630X3@taronga.hackercorp.com>, peter@taronga.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> jp@tygra.UUCP (John Palmer) writes:
>>    2> A privacy amendment, setting out certain principles and 
>>       rights in this area, including an order for congress to pass
>>       any neccessary laws to protect this level of privacy both
>>       from invasions by the govt. and by one person(s) against
>>       another person(s) [This includes corporations].
> 
> Downside: Exxon sues Greenpeace for keeping a dossier on oil spills.
> 
> Etcetera. I think you can see the problems.

Bingo, you've got it.  It is tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys,
and generally the bad guys will use such laws to keep the good guys from
finding out.

This has already been done in Europe.  Newspapers have been sued for keeping
information about (famous?) people in their computers.  Their solution was to
keep them in a paper file.

In the US, you don't need a license to print a newspaper, or a newsrag.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO 63132-1806
Domain: sean@dranet.dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100

herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (04/13/91)

In article <9418@rsiatl.Dixie.Com>, jgd@Dixie.Com (John G. DeArmond) writes:
> randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) writes:
> 
>>Folks, can any of you tell me just what all this lifestyle information
>>is used for currently?  *Not* potentially.  What's being done with it
>>now?  
> 
> The publicly stated use of this information is to be better able to 
> target you with direct mail and phone solicitations.  In the 
> classic double-speak of marketing, the offer it as a benefit to you
> the shopper.  In reality, what they are trying to do is to improve the
> average 1% return rate on direct marketing.  They don't want to 
> bother the other 99% who don't respond.

Targeting a mailing to people who are interested in the product being
offered does make the mailing more cost effective for the people sending
the mail.  It does also make a larger fraction of the people who
receive it people who are interested in the offer.  Thus the mailing
is less of an annoyance to the decriers of direct mail.
> 
> Now you might think that this is peachy-cool since you don't respond
> to junk mail anyway.  Not true.  The lifestyle profiles are based on
> what you actually buy and where you go.  The model assumes that if you
> buy X from Y store, that you'd be amenable to buying the same X 
> through alternative channels. 

Targeting a mailing to the right audience is not a science, it is an art.  
It is not done by computers.  It is done by people who use great amounts of
heuristic intuition to ask questions of those databases.  Some do it well
and make a lot of money by finding and satisfying a lot of buyers.  Some
do it badly and pour lots of money down a black hole.  People who do it
well get more than 1% returns.  People who do it badly give it a bad name.

> Or in the case of the grocery stores,
> they want to only shelf what the bulk of the customers are buying.

A store that works on a 1% or less margin has to stock what the people
who visit that store want to buy.  Otherwise, it goes bankrupt.

> What this means is that if you're not white, median aged, with 2.1
> kids, live in 1500 sq ft of space and watch 4.6 hours of TV, you 
> might not like the selection.  

Forgive me, John, but any store that stocks for this profile and sells
to another profile quickly goes bankrupt with a large unsold inventory.
One of those successful direct marketers said that he can spend ten
minutes walking the aisles of a grocery store and give you a profile
of the population of the neighborhood. 

> As someone else noted, diversity is what
> makes the shopping experience satisfying

not really

> and this kind of stuff is
> the antithesis of selection.
>
1.  The seller who does not sell anything gets out of the selling biz.
    (or starves)

2.  The only way a seller can sell something is to find someone who
    wants it.  (Remember, the seller does not use a gun.)

3.  Thus, the seller who is tied to buyers who walk in must offer
    merchandise that his neighbors (people who might walk in) are
    interested in.  Only within that limit is diversity interesting
    or satisfying or profitable.

John, if you want your shopping experience to be "satisfying", you have
to find a seller who has found five to twenty thousand people who are
satisfied by the same things as you are satisfied by.  That seller is
devoting significant effort to help you find him.  Direct mail is one
of the tools he may use.

If the two of you do not get together, one of you may remain unsatisfied.
The other may go bankrupt. 
> 
>>And, equally serious question -- is the information you get any more
>>detailed or valuable than could be gotten by scanning the telephone
>>book and walking through your neighborhood?  I'm beginning to get the
>>strong impression that vast amounts of effort are being spent to
>>gather information that -- for the most part -- just isn't that useful
>>and is pretty easily available anyhow.
> 
> Yes, much more valuable.  First off, walking a neighborhood will 
> provide some basic demographics but even those are not reliable.  
> For example, you could be living on the edge of bankrupcy in a $200,000
> neighborhood and not have any disposable income at all. 

Neighborhood targeting is better than no targeting, but this is one
of its weaknesses.

> Secondly,
> it is well known that people often times say just the opposite of what
> they do.  Lifestyle information is brutally accurate in documenting
> certain habits.  The conclusions drawn are often incorrect but the
> facts are not.  If your register tape shows you bought 30 lbs of beef last 
> month, you actually bought at least that much.

Go into your grocery store and look at the breakfast cereal display.
Compare the amount of shelf space devoted to Cheerios and Wheaties
with the amount of shelf space devoted to Sugar Frosted Flakes (I'm
sorry, I don't watch enough television to have a brand name here).
Now do the same exercise in a grocery store in a neighborhood as
different from yours as you can find.

The competition among the cereal manufacturers for that shelf space
is brutal.  Why is the proportion so different in the two stores?
(I tried to fabricate a simple example, probably did it badly.  However,
the cereal shelves in the two stores will look very different.  The
stores may be supermarkets with the same chain name on them.)
> 
> If that were as far as it went, I might not have a big problem.  But as
> we've seen SSNs and credit databases abused, so will this information be
> abused.  To paraphrase, it exists, ergo, it will be abused.

I stand with John on this soapbox.  I devote a lot of effort to minimizing
the personal data I release.  And more to obfuscating what I do release.

However, if we make it impossible to target a market, shopping will be
unsatisfying and sellers will go out of business.  Or, rather, whatever
we do to the rules of the game, the sellers who succeed in targeting
their markets will make shopping from them satisfying, and those who
don't will go out of business.
> 
> John
> 
> -- 
> John De Armond, WD4OQC        | "Purveyors of speed to the Trade"  (tm)
> Rapid Deployment System, Inc. |  Home of the Nidgets (tm)
> Marietta, Ga                  | 
> jgd@dixie.com                 |"Politically InCorrect.. And damn proud of it  

dan herrick
herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com

herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (05/07/91)

In article <1991May01.024205.13181@ddsw1.MCS.COM>, zane@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Sameer Parekh) writes:
> 	Thank you for posting that.  I had previously thought that Prodigy
> was simply a dumb service.  Now I am committed to the education of people to
> stop using Prodigy.  I will be writing an 'information sheet' which I will
> distribute so that we can educate those who are not on the net.  I will post
> it here first so that I may get feedback on how it is.
> 	(I didn't hear about it from this post, a friend who obviously read
> this post told me about it.)
> -- 
Go over to comp.dcom.telecom and read the whole thread.  It is a
feature of MSDOS, not of Prodigy.  One MAC user expressed disappointment
that he could not find inapropriate data in the Prodigy data file.

dan herrick
herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com