Apple products are popular, but they’re not cheap. There’s a certain cachet that goes with them, a projection of status and class. And Apple’s newest patent isn’t for another high-cost, high-popularity product… it’s for tech that will only advertise stuff to you that they think you can afford. [More]
big data is watching
Study: Consumers Give Up Data In Exchange For Discounts Because They Figure It’s All Out There Anyway
By 6.8.15
You’re shopping at a store you’ve never been to before. They offer to sign you up for a loyalty card. You know it’s going to create endless postal and electronic spam for you if you accept, but they’ll give you 40% off of this order if you do. So you take the card. The store thinks they just bought your info with a discount. Are they right? [More]
Verizon Knows More About What You Watch On FiOS Than You Do
By 5.29.15
Verizon isn’t a cable company. Its FiOS product doesn’t spring from decades of guaranteed local monopolies, which means most FiOS customers can, if they get annoyed enough, jump ship to a competitor. But you leaving is bad news for Verizon. They want to keep their subscribers. And they have an enormous mountain of highly personalized data on hand to try to do it with. [More]
Privacy Advocates Sue Virginia Police Over Data From Automatic License Plate Scanners
By 5.6.15
By itself, your license plate doesn’t say much except in what state, month, and year you registered your car. But start tracking where and when that license plate goes, and you’ve suddenly got a whole huge pile of personal data about all the comings and goings in someone’s life. We’ve reported before that license plate scanning by public and private entities is both widespread and unregulated. Now, the ACLU is suing police in one state to get them to stop. [More]
Private Companies Building Giant Unregulated Databases Tracking License Plate Location Info
By 5.19.14
Do you know everywhere your car has been in the past week? Month? Year? You may or may not remember it all, but there’s a good chance that your license plate has had its photo snapped, and its location recorded, a whole bunch of times in that period. And anyone who can pony up the cash for a subscription to that database can tell exactly where you’ve been. [More]
Predictive Models, Secret Scores: How Computers Decide Who You Are & What To Sell You
By 3.20.14
Savvy consumers all know that their lifetime debt history ends up in their credit score, and that lenders use that score to try to predict if someone is a good bet for a big loan like a mortgage. But even the most-connected consumer may not realize how many hundreds of other scores we all now trail in our wakes too, thanks to the advent of big data. Do you know, to the last decimal, how likely are you to buy jewelry? To sign up for cable? To have a kid in the next year? Someone, somewhere, is tallying all of that information about almost everyone. But good luck finding out what’s out there, who’s scoring it, and if your numbers are even actually about you at all. [More]
