This strikes me also as being analogous to all-in-one ID cards (e.g. campus IDs or various proposals for national ID cards) - where once a person's records were held in discrete offices and therefore much more difficult to collate for profiling or investigative purposes, now there is handy access to the whole package through linked records. Who is it convenient for? Jericho -- Michael Zimmer wrote: Hi Ellis - Well, it is convenient when my grocer tracks my purchases through my frequent shopper card so I can count on certain items remaining in stock (assuming I'm not the only one buying them). And perhaps it is helpful for Google to provide an advertisement for digital cameras if I search for "Olympus Stylus". That's using particular bits of my activities in order to taylor a particular service to me. But it's a difference in kind when my activities that were previously dispersed across various products, services, and locations can be tracked an aggregated into a single source. And it's also a difference in kind when that information is processed in order to create some kind of psychological profile of what kind of a person I am (not just what beer I buy or what I happen to be searching for that day). Who knows what kind of decisions might be made based on such an attempt to profile my psyche. (I'm thinking of issues raised in: Bowker & Star's "Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences", Gandy's "The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information," and Lyon's "Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination" ) And I have yet to see any documentation from companies such as Google outlining precisely what information about me they collect, how it might be aggregated across their products & services, and what kind of processing they perform with said data, and with whom it has been shared with. The typical "privacy policy" is purposefully vague on such details. -mz ----- Michael Zimmer, PhD Microsoft Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School e: michael.zimmer@nyu.edu w: http://michaelzimmer.org On Jul 10, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Ellis Godard wrote: > Perhaps I'm new-fashioned, but I like targeted communications based > on mined > data. There's always been tracking, capturing, aggregating, and > profiling - > it's just getting better executed, and somewhat better documented, > each of > which is arguably a boon. > -e > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l- >> bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Michael Zimmer >> Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 6:40 PM >> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org >> Subject: Re: [Air-l] Google scares me again >> >> Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I think psychological profiling of >> users based online habits is a tad more problematic than just >> "somewhat" of an ethical minefield. >> >> Microsoft recently announced their hopes to do something similar: >> http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/05/23/msft-wants-to-identify-all-web- >> surfers-based-on-surfing-habits/ >> >> One wonders if any part of one's earthly existence will remain >> untouched by those wanting to track, capture, aggregate, and >> profile... >> >> -mz > > _______________________________________________ > The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list > is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org > Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// > listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org > > Join the Association of Internet Researchers: > http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/