VSI

Great episode of Fresh Air today, describing how companies are collecting and selling data about you, and then (creepily) mirroring that data back at you, so that your advertising world become more and more constrained, like in the book The Big Sort.  What they think you are is what you are and what you must remain.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147189154/how-companies-are-defining-your-worth-online

Panopticon / Hall of Mirrors philosophical questions aside, the intense competition is changing companies behavior.  Google used to be proud of the fact that they didn't cross-crunch your data between Gmail accounts.  Their company slogan was "Dont be Evil."  Now they're publicly merging all their services, and privately hacking Apple's Safari browser to bypass its third-party cookie security features, because if they don't, they'll lose out to Facebook.  Competition selects for specific adaptive behaviors.

What will our response as consumers/data sources be?  How would a biological species evolve information defenses?  One way is to compartmentalize.  Multiple unconnected or disposable accounts, like Michael Weston using disposable phones on Burn Notice.  I can't think of an perfect biological analogy at this moment.  The other is to lie.  Zebra stripes shifting and merging as the herd runs makes it very hard to pick out one zebra to focus your attack on.  What if you randomly visited websites to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio?  Or deliberately visited the "wrong" websites?  Or combined both strategies into multiple online personas, none of whom defines you?  Roger Zelazny partially intuited this way back in the 70s with his 3 My Name is Legion stories (is there a more popular Bible reference in all of pop culture?).

Why would you bother?  Maybe you're paranoid.  Maybe you're simply not confident that your data is being used in ways that you like.  Certainly it's not just advertisers who want your data.  The Obama campaign openly admits that it buys data about you, and the Romney campaign is already using this information to target advertisements to tell you only those things that you want to hear.