Tagging Humans

I was thinking evil thoughts today. Really evil. A species of malevolent ruminations worthy of a pension-raiding, investor-swindling, mother-selling, capitalist bastard. The variety of mental transmissions that tickle the antennas of card-carrying, tin-foil hat wearing, professional paranoids everywhere, inducing ulcers, panic, and cerebral aneurisms.

I was thinking about tracking every noteworthy individual on the planet.

Everyone has been focused on the looming RFID revolution. Whether here or abroad, retailers are tripping over themselves for the chance to shave an extra tenth of a point off the cost of selling you underwear by reducing or eliminating supply chain costs. In the process, a lot of people have been getting concerned about RFID’s potential to violate personal privacy, with concerns ranging from the bland (RFID in that shirt from Benetton will be used to sell you more crap) to the downright diabolical (RFID will mark you for death).

But why bother waiting for RFID, when nearly every person in North America owns a cell phone – a piece of radio hardware that actively emits a unique radio signature? Only a hapless introvert doesn’t own a cell-phone these days – like me! Those individuals that don’t own a cell phone probably don’t buy much stuff anyway – like me! – a capitalist bastard wouldn’t care about these individuals anyway.

Already, we’ve seen cell-phone based location services for tracking teenagers, or 911 calls. But all of these use some form of GPS-enabled or cell-tower enabled triangulation technology – I’m talking about something much simpler: a receiver that detects cell phones at close range (a few feet) and decodes the cell phone’s unique identifier, and a glob of software to cram that the unique identifier into a database. Imagine the possibilities:

• Track movement through a store: a store could scatter a number of these receivers throughout a store, gaining insight into how customers move through a store, and which areas customers never visit. It would also enable the store to infer which products customers appeared to be interested in (based on where they stopped within the store) but didn’t purchase – opening the possibility for an individually tailored marketing campaign.
• Reconcile data: though large chains can already reconcile credit card information to gain a more complete profile of their customers, what if the customer pays cash? Data loss! By tracking the customer on an ongoing basis, a store would be more likely to eventually be able to tie cash purchases to a particular person – sooner or later, the customer will use a credit card, thereby enabling their cash purchases to be tied to the credit card owner.
• Figure out which customers not to sell to: on a larger scale, a mall could offer this service to all of its merchants – if you’re Old Navy, why would you try to sell jeans to a customer that you know just came from the Gap and already bought a pair of jeans there? Maybe you should try to sell them a shirt instead.
• Grouping purchases: who comes into the store with whom? Who does the purchasing? Additional demographic insight abounds.
• Fraud prevention (this one from Ashley): Once a cell phone is mapped to a person, it’s a simple task to figure out whether or not the person presenting the credit card needs to be subjected to additional scrutiny. After all, if the person at the cash register is carrying a cell phone with an identifier that doesn’t match that the one associated with the credit card, chances are you’ve got yerself a fraud.

The more I think about it, this isn’t really evil. Actually, it’s tedious – really, really tedious.

Do we really need to gather more data? Especially when it’s data that someone will never look at, never analyze, and never use to stop interrupting me with ads for stuff I would never buy in a million years? Probably not. Yes, there will probably be some privacy violations; however, as Scott McNealy said, you have zero privacy anyway. And if he’s wrong, well, I can only say this: if the Department of Defense can’t track its expenses, what chance does it or other corporations have of effectively tracking individuals by RFID, cell phones, or any other means?

To those that have grandiose visions of gaining insight into the consumer soul through technology: good freaking luck. To those that would worry about Big Brother leering over your every move: they already do it, they’re bad at it, and frankly your life just isn’t that interesting – relax.