As marketers, retailers and governments map your desires in ever-greater detail, your purchasing decisions, your lifestyle choices, even your political preferences are influenced in ways you barely perceive. From the behavioural targeting that seeks to track your online life to the brain scans intended to trigger your purchasing decisions, the modern persuader's toolkit claims scientific validity as never before.
Now a new generation of pervasive technologies is about to take influence to the next level. By merging real-time databases of your TV and web viewing, your past purchasing decisions, even your physical movements and facial expressions, the persuaders are hoping to understand and mould your personal preferences to an unprecedented degree.
Neuroscience, too, is being used to study how to manipulate customer demand. Lucid Systems, a marketing-research company visited for this special wired investigation, promises its clients "the unspoken truth" about people's innermost thoughts: "Objective scientific data to help you discover not just what people say, but what they... feel about advertising and marketing messages, brands and products - even before they are aware they are doing so."
These are the new hidden persuaders - corporations and public authorities intent on using technology to understand and alter your intentions below your level of consciousness. The use of science in the quest for consumers' "buy" button is, of course, nothing new:
52 years ago, journalist Vance Packard prompted an outcry with his bestselling book The Hidden Persuaders, which warned that "many of us are being influenced and manipulated" by the new "motivational research" industry. Its operatives, Packard wrote, use "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" to manipulate "inner thoughts, fears and dreams", typically "beneath our level of awareness". Such manipulation, he concluded, was immoral, as it removed people's "right to decide... what they want to do and who they want to be".
Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from psychographic memory triggers to galvanic skin-response meters to try to discover how we feel about their products. Dewar's Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink;
DaimlerChrysler turned to brainimaging studies to determine which car designs most excited target customers. Such "neuromarketing" research has been gaining ground since the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, was launched in 2002 to give corporations "unprecedented insight into their consumers' minds". Although the scientific claims made for neuromarketing are often spurious, corporations from DreamWorks to Ford have since used magnetic resonance imaging scanners and electroencephalography to peer inside consumers' brains.
But for marketers seeking certainty, your personal data trail offers a tool of unprecedented power. The current debate about "behavioural targeting" - individually directed adverts based on a web user's browsing history, controversially served by data-crunchers such as Phorm or Google - will be remembered as quaintly innocent when consumers wake up to the power of the next-generation tracking technologies. How naked will your personal preferences be to advertisers when your entire digital-TV remote-control clickstream is merged with your web-browsing history, your storecard and email data, records of all your movements via face-recognition cameras and radio frequency identification tags, and maps of your mobile phone's signals? Even if you are determined to resist such data-led manipulation of your deepest desires, how do you know that this vast pool of information will not leak out or be used against your own interests, perhaps by a health insurer or a future employer?
As our special investigation reveals over the next 12 pages, these are no abstract fears that can be dismissed as paranoia. The tracking technologies have arrived and are already being tested in real situations - even if the respective databases have not yet all been combined in real time. Sense Networks, a San Francisco company covered in our report, is already tracking mobile-phone users via global positioning satellites, phone masts that catch their signals, or local Wi-Fi networks that detect their presence. The company tracks consumers as dots moving across a map and then analyses each user's behaviour to place him or her in a designated "tribe" - "young and edgy" night owls, or "barflies" who stay loyal to their local bar. Such firms generally claim to anonymise data, but consumers have to take such pledges on trust.
The speed at which such technologies are being rolled out tends to overtake the law's ability to police them. So this is the moment for citizens to debate and demand privacy assurances, legal safeguards and transparency. Who will have access to such vast data trails, and for how long? How secure is information within each system? Could the state demand access to such databases - or could they be sold to commercial third parties? Never forget that data collected for one anodyne purpose may well be used for far more pernicious ones.
Vance Packard knew the risks. Five decades on, we may dismiss as overwrought his fears about the psychological manipulators. But Packard did understand the dangers of allowing privacy to be left to an unaccountable class of persuaders excitedly exploring their magical new tool-kit. "Many of the people-manipulating activities of persuaders raise profoundly disturbing questions about the kind of society they are seeking to build," he wrote. They have, he said, the power to do good or evil "on a scale never before possible... It is this right to privacy in our minds - privacy to be either rational or irrational - that I believe we must strive to protect."
This is the introduction to Wired UK's 14 page special report on the new hidden persuaders: read the whole package in the print edition, available at your newsagent now. You can read other articles from special report here: - Data that define your retail options
How the TV watches you
When advertising gets in your face
Mining your mobile phone logs - Your unconscious mind has already voted - Now marketing gets sniffy - Neuromarketing is a go - Eye-tracking adverts - Your secret shopping personality
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
