They know where you live (and everything else about you)
(Filed: 13/06/2005)

You have no secrets from the booming electronic personal information
industry - and you should be worried, says David Derbyshire

They know your favourite brand of whisky and how many cars are parked
in your drive. They know what time you leave work and where you buy
your petrol. If pressed, they can predict where you will go on
holiday, how you vote and what fragrance you like. 

We have become a nation of "glass consumers" - every detail of our
spending habits has become transparent to those organisations who keep
tabs on us. Everything we do, everywhere we go, leaves a trail.

No one knows how many marketing lists are circulating in Britain,
packed with trivial and not-so-trivial details of our likes, dislikes,
income and lifestyle. But the electronic personal information industry
is booming - and last year was worth [UKP] 2 billion. Marketers argue 
that the mountain of information held on each of us is for our own good. 
It ensures that we can be targeted with the goods and services we really
want.

But consumer and civil rights groups are increasingly worried that 
it is also being used to discriminate and exclude. And when the
information is wrong, it can stop people getting credit cards,
services or even jobs.

Concerns about the threat to our identity and privacy from the
explosion of the personal information economy are raised in a new
book, The Glass Consumer, published this week by the National Consumer
Council.

Traditionally, concerns about privacy have concentrated on the
intrusions justified as being essential for combating terrorism, crime
or anti-social behaviour. The Government wants all drivers to carry a
compulsory satellite tracking device in their cars. The European
Commission wants mobile phone companies and internet service providers
to keep details about every website visited for three years.

Security agencies can track most people to within a few hundred feet
of their mobile phones, which work by revealing their locations to the
phone networks. If you haven't got a phone, the trail of credit and
debit cards will reveal where you've been recently.

But, according to the NCC, the erosion of privacy from the personal
information industry is just as concerning. Susanne Lace, author of
The Glass Consumer, says most people are unaware how much information
is held about them by marketing companies.

"Allusions to Big Brother scrutiny are becoming dated. Instead, we are
now moving towards a society of little brothers," she says.

We've got a file on you

Details of every economically active adult in the developing world 
are thought to be stored on just 700 major databases. You've probably
never heard of the company Experian - but they've almost certainly
heard about you. The company has details of 45 million people in
Britain and is one of the three main credit reference agencies.

Around 16 million of us have filled in one of Experian's detailed
lifestyle surveys - its booklets are sent through the post with
questions about our income, insurance policies, hobbies, favourite
music and reading habits.

The information collected by Experian and the other market research
companies from postal surveys is combined with data from credit-card
applications, mail-order shopping firms and online surveys to create
specialist lists of customers: such as single men aged 35 to 45 who
like flashy cars, or women in their sixties with big gardens.

Data also comes from the state. Since 1981, information from the
Census has been released to businesses, and has been used to create
postcode profiles which are used by at least 500 of the UK's call
centres, and which can pinpoint the streets where the richest and
poorest people live. Calls to banks and retailers from people living
in areas perceived as wealthy are put through immediately to the best-
spoken, best-trained and most courteous sales staff. Callers from less
affluent postcodes can find themselves pushed to the bottom of the
queue, where they wait in automated-voice hell.

Other sources of information are more unexpected. Computers store
"cookies", which reveal to any website what you have bought from other
online stores. Then there are the supermarket loyalty card schemes,
pioneered by Tesco in the 1990s, which record every single item you
buy. Thanks to the cards, supermarkets know more about your shopping
habits than you do - what days you shop, how swayed you are by
advertising and instore promotions and what wine you prefer with
chicken.

(snip)

Full article at The Telegraph / UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/13/ftbuyer13.xml

Cheers, Steve..

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