As a society, the U.S. (less so Europe) has acquiesced in giving up our privacy piecemeal: until lately, we suffered telemarketers to phone us in the sanctity of our homes, and we're now allowing businesses to track us as well, in order to get a "discount" on products already artificially marked up. And we allow banks and credit card companies to collect marketing data based on our purchases, without the pretense of a discount.
Hey, business isn't collecting this information on a lark, folks.
It's far from free to hand out millions of "loyalty card" and put together tracking systems and computers and databases data mining.
("Loyalty" cards? When I was a kid, you were loyal to your country and your family. Now I'm supposed to be "loyal" to a fucking supermarket? Did I mis-read the story of the minutemen? Did they lay down their lives for Safeway and 5% off assorted frozen dinners?)
So I think we can safely assume that, given the cost of all this tracking, the companies doing it have assured themselves that they'll make much more money by doing it, than it costs them to do it.
Now, since these companies are (mostly) in the business of selling products to "end-users" -- that's you, the person being tracked, or selling your data to other companies that want to market to "end users" -- again, that's you with the bar code figuratively tattooed on your ass (or for readers of the Christian Bible's Revelations, the forehead), where, exactly do you think all that money is going to come from?
Yeah, that;s right: the companies are tracking you because they mean to squeeze more -- much more, given the costs of tracking -- out of you. Either the company tracking you extracts it themselves, or the company that bought the data has to jack up their consumer prices to cover the cost of buying the data.
So in the end, after you've sold your birthright of freedom and privacy for a mess of pottage that's 20% off for "loyalty card members", after you've been tracked from mall to market to mortgage payment like a tagged animal in a biologist's field research project, after all that in the long term, you're not really going to be saving anything.
Quick, check the card they assigned you, and see if the name on it isn't "Sucker".
Article by Orthogonal
