No more secrets

Response to  Duhigg’s “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”

Even though it is a well known fact that when you use your discount card, or you sign up for email with a store, they are collecting personal information about you and your spending habits in order to sell you more stuff, it is still off putting to read an article that so eloquent explains the process of this, the commonality and the justification behind it.

The goal behind the companies gathering information is so they can make more money. I have to ask myself, why is it we are so willing to offer our personal information up so freely just to save $0.12 on Charmin toilet paper? I’m extremely guilty of this, but I grew up in an age that I wasn’t as sensitive to keeping my information private. I shop online, to my mother’s dismay. I put in my credit card information and willingly offer up my email so that I can get my receipt for my purchase.

Statisticians are the new magicians, using their tricks to make us believe we’ve decided to shop at Target by choice, when really, it was probably a result of some researcher learning our habits and figuring out how to use those habitual actions to lure us through the front doors of the store.

Reading through this article, was like having the magic turned off, even if just for a moment. Duhigg describes a lab where scientists have miniature operating tables and spend all day studying the habits of rats. The scientists begin to observe that, “As the path became more automatic – as it became habit – the rats started thinking less and less” (3). This quote reminds me of my first point to this point, which was that though we know what these companies are doing, we don’t really think about it. Every store has a discount or membership card. Every store wants your email so you will be the first one to know about their amazing sale.

The example of the father that found out his daughter was pregnant because of Target sending her coupons for maternity clothes and baby paraphernalia was disconcerting. Because our brains are so complex, and we can make almost any behavior that we repeat, a habit, provided that we have the sequence of cue, routine then reward, researchers and therefore the large conglomerates they work for are able to know our deepest secrets.

But the nice thing this article highlights about habits is that we can take control of our habits the way researchers do just by paying attention to our own tendencies and urges.

Response to Agre’s Surveillance and Capture

With the onset of the mass use of technology, it became more and more plausible that our own trusted computers are actually keeping record of what we are doing in our daily lives. So it is no longer science fiction that the government or whomever wishes to gather information is able to do so using your own technology against you. If the surveillance model is linked to the political action of the time, then the capture model is closely related to the emergence of technology.

The article goes on to state that basically, there are always going to be two sides to a coin. We have those that see the vast benefits computing has added to our lives, then there are those that see how computing and technology have made it easier for those that are in control, to control us. I’m of the belief that in all things that have the potential to morph a society, there will come the good and the bad. But what we should do, is educated ourselves so at least at that point when I’m shopping online and putting in all of my personal information, I am aware of the risk of my computer capturing my information and someone else being able to access it.