Big data. Real-world sensor networks. The ultimate monetisation of our lives. This is the story of how a free internet led to a more expensive world.
By the time I've finished writing this article, 87 companies will have collected information about my browsing habits. (Collusion, a plug-in, furnished this information.) Panopticlick, a site run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells me my browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,621,754 tested, and that it "conveys at least 21.79 bits of identifying information".
As we know from entropy theory, it takes only 33 bits of entropy to identify a person. If facts such as gender (one bit) are easily discernible, and cookie tracking and online-behaviour monitoring furnish much more, how hard is it for a company to know who you are?
And this is the easy stuff, ignoring entirely the kind of complicated social graphing you can get from Facebook, or the near ubiquity of Google's monitoring network. (KnowPrivacy estimates that over 88 per cent of sites inform Google of your behaviour on their site.) If this many companies are collecting all this data, and are able to connect it to exactly who I am, what are they doing with it?
The answer is: making money. They're doing it by setting prices to exactly the maximum that I - or any individual - will willingly pay. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that retailers vary prices based on user information; simulated visits to Staples.com from every US postcode (more than 42,000 of them) showed that prices varied for about a third of Staples products tested, by an average of eight per cent, based on factors such as estimated income and proximity to rival stores.
The web's promise - to empower shoppers to find the best deal - is giving way to an online world that is increasingly tailored and targeted. You are analysed personally, not simply according to where you live.
Where this attitude of "collect everything, analyse all" crosses the Rubicon is when it steps off the internet. It's not news that buses have cameras installed. But did you know that they are also adding microphones?
Infrared cameras can track your movements so that what you're looking at or touching, even your posture, can be recorded. As machine-vision systems advance, Your actions - such as picking up a particular product - can be tracked against your mood, as shown by your facial expression. When better to raise the price of that product ?
A new technology, picosecond lasers, expected in airports soon, can detect, from 50 metres away, your heart rate, temperature... and how much coffee you've had.
The problem is most people aren't too excited about paying the most they're possibly willing to for anything they want to buy.
Yes, the price we will pay is one we're willing to swallow - but increasingly it will never be any less. Combine that capacity with insidious new advertising capabilities (such as combining the faces of your two best friends to make a face you'll trust, but not recognise - and then using that face in an ad). Now commerce becomes something sinister.
This is not only eroding our privacy, but creating the ultimate monetisation of our lives. As the technologies used to analyse data and personalise pricing advance, we're going to have to decide whether to buy in or not. We'd better choose while we still can.
Josh Klein is a hacker and author of Reputation Economics: Why Who You Know is Worth More Than What You Have
(Palgrave)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
