For an interesting take on this, read "The Space Merchants" by Frederick
Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth.  One of the 5% in Sturgeon's Law.  :-)

Bob Jarvis
Compuware @ Timken

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Richard A. O'Keefe [SMTP:ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz]
> Sent:	Monday, February 21, 2000 10:48 PM
> To:	squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject:	Re: Project for someone to do
> 
> 	> That having been said, we (like every other company in this field)
> are
> 	> looking at moving into what is described as "one-to-one marketing"
> (that
> 	> can't be bad can it?).
> 
> What a silly question.  Of *course* it can be bad.
> 
> The first thing you have to understand is that advertising is not
> about *meeting* wants; it is about *creating* wants.  The second
> thing you have to understand is that there is a huge disparity in
> *power* between the advertisers and the people they advertise to.
> In general, helping the strong to prey even more efficiently on the
> weak is pretty hard to defend.
> 
> I have had to help people who have been the victims of high pressure
> salesmanship, where they went to what they thought was going to be a
> social occasion amongst friends and ended up feeling that they were
> obliged to buy things they had no intention of buying when they went.
> 
> One-to-one marketing isn't the same thing, but it IS a situation where
> the advertiser has a very marked advantage over the target.
> 
> 	>The current idea is that for a single advertiser, we
> 	> can track peoples history,
> 
> There you deceive the people who pay you.  Without biometrics (which
> heaven forbid, in this context) you CANNOT track the history of
> people, only the history of actions taken by unknown people through
> certain machines.  I've had e-mail forged in my name.  I get spam I
> can't even read.  I get spam from people who swear blind that I
> volunteered to join their lists when I never even heard of them before.
> 
> 	> and better interact with them.
> 
> For "better interact with them" read "more efficiently prey on them".
> 
> 	> So if you buy a
> 	> AppleG4, and we're serving apple's ad's, we can show you an add
> for the new
> 	> AirPort card you didn't buy.
> 
> If I wanted to know about that, I'd *ask*.  For you to come ramming it
> down
> my throat is rude.  It's a waste of my time and a waste of yours.
> 
> 	> On the upside, it's like your grandfather
> 	> walking into the general store, and having the people there know
> him, and
> 	> what he likes.
> 
> It is not in the least like that.  When your grandfather walks into the
> general store, HE knows THEM too.  There is a balance of power in that
> situation which is completely missing from Web "wire-tapping" advertising.
> 
> It is _already_ the case that "25% of records in commercial
> data bases contain at least one incorrect field" according to
> one book on data quality.  It is _already_ the case that theft of
> identity is a growing social problem in the wired countries.
> It is _already_ the case that existing privacy data protection acts are
> really not doing the job they should of letting people know what is held
> about them and giving them _effective_ power to change incorrect data.
> 
> And some people want to make this _worse_?