meters

This page considers consumer and audience monitoring, surveillance that is often more persuasive and restrictive than observation by the state.

It covers -

• introduction
• entertainment - tracking who's watching what
• products - is spending the same as using?
• other spending
• communications
• lending - credit referencing and accommodation blacklists

It supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding audience measurement, marketing, credit referencing, online metrics and opinion polling.

     introduction

For better or for worse, advanced economies are founded on private sector identification of what people are doing (or say they are doing) and what they have done, with that surveillance providing a basis for inferences about what people will do in future and for decisions on matters such as access to credit and employment vetting that determine people's lives.

Some tracking (such as credit referencing) is specific to the individual and in practice represents the dominant form of surveillance of most individuals. Other tracking uses samples of the population as surrogates for monitoring the tastes and activities of individuals, with conclusions for example about who is watching particular television programs, listening to a specific radio station, planning to vote for a certain politician or buying a particular soap powder.

Some surveillance may be immediate and overt, with individuals being required to provide hair and urine samples or to accept keystroke logging and closed circuit television observation as a condition of employment. Other surveillance may be less readily discernable, with individuals being unaware of what information is being aggregated, what entities are performing that aggregation and how the resultant profiles are being traded.

The outcome of some private sector monitoring is ultimately trivial - the success of a particular brand of cat litter or aerated water is of fundamental importance to MBA students and ad campaign managers rather than the real world - but practices such as poll-driven public policy development suggest that some surveillance is 'meaningful'.

The discussion of privacy elsewhere on this site criticised some of the more naive and fervent rhetoric in Australian and overseas debate, which offers a simplistic characterisation of a polar relationship between a repressive 'surveillance state' and the community (or individual). Reality is more complex, with shades of assent and awareness regarding a surveillance ecosystem that features a wide range of relationships across the public and private sectors. Some relationships are highlighted below as points of entry to more detailed discussion elsewhere on this site.

The borders between private and official surveillance have blurred, with governments for example acquiring information from business enterprises and commercial data brokers aggregating public sector information in building profiles about individuals or demographics.

     entertainment

Publishers, film producers, broadcasters and advertisers have traditionally been interested in what people are reading, watching or listening to.

That interest reflects prediction of future markets (publishers, for example, generally operate on a commercial basis and are reluctant to consistently produce works that do not sell).

It also reflects comparisons between competing venues, with advertisers for example being charged different rates depending on newspaper circulation figures, the exposure of billboards (those next to busy roads typically attract a premium relative to boards without much traffic) or the demographic attracted to a particular broadcast.

It has resulted in the growth of a range of audience metrics specialists, from circulation audit bureaus (how many titles sold) to enterprises offering data about what percentage of the radio audience listened to a specific soap opera and thus was likely to encounter a particular advertisement.

Mechanisms for identification of audiences (and for determination of responses) at an aggregate and individual level are often fuzzy

     products and services

[under development].

A discussion of consumer market research is here.

A discussion of UGI rating sites is here.

     other spending

[under development]

Much information is collected by nongovernment organisations (and often provided to third parties) because it is volunteered by individuals or provided in connection with a product warranty.

Some consumers, for example, provide marketers with address and other details by entering competitions - ie giving their data to the marketer in exchange for a mere opportunity to win a prize. Such data collection is evident in many Australian retail malls, where passers by are encouraged to stop at a booth and enter the competition. As noted elsewhre on this site, the consumer has no awareness of who will receive the information and how it will be used.

Retailers and other organisations collect and frequently sell customer data, which often extends beyond basic contact details to include demographic information and of course may be enhanced through integration with other data sets. Sale of mailing lists (for example those promoted to consumers as the basis of special offers, newsletters and catalogues) or 'loyalty program' lists is a substantial business, one that is a key element of the information broking (aka data trading) discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site.

A point of entry to the marketing literature is Joseph Turow's Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (Cambridge: MIT Press 2006)

     communication

Are private sector entities aware of what calls you are making, how many emails you are sending/receiving, whether you are downloading particular formats of data online or what sites you are visiting?

     lending

C. Wright Mills' 1951 White Collar echoed Max Weber in commenting that

As skyscrapers replace rows of small shops, so offices replace free markets. Each office within the skyscraper is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.

Much of that shaping involves collection of information that is used to assess the credit-worthiness of individuals and businesses or as a basis for decisions regarding provision of insurance, accommodation and other goods. Those decisions may be expressed as tenancy or other blacklists.

As noted in the more detailed discussion of consumer credit referencing and blacklisting, such data collection is pervasive - most people in advanced economies have been profiled by the major reference services - and may have a more fundamental effect on the lives of individuals than ordinary surveillance by government agencies.





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