subject: Beware Shopper, Privacy Violation Is A Real Danger When You Shop [print this page] Profiling people has become a popular use by a number of entities that use the Internet. When someone accesses his or her computer to buy items, or read particular articles, he or she is tagged as liking certain things.
This data is paired with offline information to create consumer profiles, permanent records that describe consumer characteristics and behaviors.
This, in turn can affect consumers' lives in general. This is done without the consumer's knowledge and, even if they did know, there is nothing they can legally do about it. Such things as video surveillance, face recognition, etc. can also enter the picture.
Many people are disconcerted by the idea of their information being collected and their online behavior monitored without their knowledge of consent. However, this is not as new a threat as people may think, as businesses have been tracking purchases using credit card and membership card data for many years now. Some companies will even label a person as a "bad customer" based on past behavior, like disputing a bill.
Direct marketers can transact this date to gain insight into a household's needs and wants as well as predict future purchases. Ordinary transactions a household might do such as magazine subscriptions, various memberships, donations, specific interests, travel arrangements, giving their zip code and others all enter into this base .
It does not matter if customers are trying to disguise their identification by shredding or using cash. They cannot escape profiling.
There are no regulations regarding this data. There are even private organizations, such as the website search-in-reverse.com/803/668/, which provide this type of collected data for private purchase, proving the existence of this unregulated information.
A search of marketing data bases and list will find people profiled under such things as 'bad credit' , 'impulse buying', 'mental problem' and many others. One must remember that these lists contain the names, addresses, age and other information regarding millions of people, the majority of whom have no idea that they are being identified in this manner.
