A few selected readers have received an ultra-personalized cover on their issue of Wired UK this month. We wanted to see how much personal data we could easily find about them from publicly available sources -- as a means of emphasizing some of the points made in our cover story by Andrew Keen, Jeff Jarvis and Steven Johnson on "what the end of privacy means for you."
Wary of scaring off our entire readership, we sent the personalized copies of Wired to some randomly selected subscribers rather than all of them, as well as to a few people we know with some media influence. Well, the media can take a little scaring.
We used sources such as the edited electoral register, Companies House, the Land Registry and the social networks. We cross-matched data from one source against others -- and so found some fascinating truths about, for instance, what readers are buying and selling on eBay (does the taxman know?), what revealing videos their children are posting online (you would be shocked), and what their exes have lately been saying about them.
The level of detail we found — from children's school reports to property profits — may worry some recipients, but that was the point. Many of us are unaware how data we post only for social reasons can later be used for other purposes — or triangulated with other data to build up detailed pictures of us.
Though recipients need not worry about what happens now with that data: only they received a copy with their personal data, and we have since destroyed our database. But you do know that data will stay out there forever, don't you?
We personalized the covers using an HP Indigo 7000 printer at FE Burman, to whom we owe our thanks — as, indeed, we do to the Condé Nast production department, whose patience we stretched. In return, we agreed not to personalize any of their particular covers of Wired …
For the record, we did not hack into any subscriber's mobile phone — or at least, I as the editor insist that I had no knowledge of such criminality.
Finally, an apology is due to the Wired publisher, who was driven to nightmares by the stress of the project: in his dream, a subscriber mistakenly received the personalized magazine intended for her ex-husband, which revealed his hidden fortune to her — and led to a lawsuit against Wired.
At least, it was only a dream at the time of going to press.
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