The modern economy collects vast amounts of data on consumers, particularly buying habits. My supermarket shoppers cards allow each company I shop with to track my purchases for months or years, a profile they use to personalize marketing to get me to buy more, sell to advertising agencies to develop advertising to get me to buy more, and sell to manufacturers to develop new products that I am likely to buy. Any time you are asked to give a company information about yourself or your purchases, in consumer surveys, warranty registrations, even customer service calls, that information goes into a profile that has a very definite economic value to the corporation, both for itself and on the open market for consumer information.
Well, it's not quite an open market. I can't buy my own profile from Safeway. If I was a data mining company, I could buy profiles by the thousand, but even though the information collected is about me, I don't receive access to it, either as a service of the Safeway Club Card program or for a fee. I'm not quite a full member in this club.
The hidden but blatant commercialism of consumer data collection isn't an inevitable outcome of data collection and mining techniques. It is the result of a particular regulatory and ethical environment which blocks the worst prejudicial uses of data but does not locate ownership and copyright of consumer data with the consumer. An enormous investment has been made in data collection in the modern networked era by retailers, manufacturers, advertisers, and the data servicing companies that serve them. There are many more implementations for that investment than selling us more stuff.
Rob Walker's Consumed column in the New York Times is hit or miss but when it hits it resonates with the deeply felt part of me that wants to be an enthusiastic patron and contributor to culture without being swept away by a mindless consumerism. A column a few months ago on consumer data described Indhira Rojas' IndexR, which posits a system in which consumer data, analyzed and delivered to the consumer, would guide recycling decisions, tapping into material data provided from up and down the supply chain.
My personal shopping data, presented to me, would be a fantastic resource for guiding future purchasing, not as a way to entice me to buy more but as a tool for making my purchases more efficient and buying less. Lets stick with supermarket shopping club card data and posit mygrocerylist.com, "Where your data works for YOU." Glancing through the last few months of groceries, on a neatly and automatically sorted chart like what Mint.com does for financial transactions, I could see that I keep buying canned bamboo shoots but never using them, or that switching from regular to organic milk has cost about $10 a month.
Aggregated across the various supermarkets I frequent, I could note to never buy canned tomatoes at Ralph's, or chicken thighs at Trader Joe's. I could autogenerate a suggested shopping list based on previous purchases, then review it for gaps and frivolities.
Aggregated across the purchases of likeminded consumers and plugged in to digitized weekly specials mailings, I could get shopping list that breaks up my weekly purchases across two or three stores (which I'm going to anyway to pick up some last minute item or because it's on the way home) to take advantage of sales, doorbusters, and run of the mill price increases and decreases. Making this easy and automatic relies on my having access to my buying habits, which has already been collected by the supermarkets.
Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: persian chicken in lime-spinach sauce at Shaherzad
dinner: roast chicken with rice and broccoli
would you sell advertising on the mygrocerylist? or blog about food? more data on its own is just overwhelming - more analysis and understanding can be motivating and persuasive. what does the data mean? that is what I am hungry for.
ReplyDeletethis post should be retweeted!