Data collection is the dominant activity of commercial websites. Some 92 percent of them collect personal data from web users, which they then aggregate, sort, and use[26]. Oscar Gandy calls this the “panoptic sort” — a vast structure for collecting data and discriminating on the basis of that data — and it is this discrimination, he says, that ought to concern us[27].
But why should it concern us? Put aside an important class of problems — the misuse of the data — and focus instead on its ordinary use. As I said earlier, the main effect is simply to make the market work more smoothly: Interests and products are matched to people in a way that is better targeted and less intrusive than what we have today. Imagine a world where advertisers could tell which venues paid and which did not; where it was inefficient to advertise with billboards and on broadcasts; where most advertising was targeted and specific. Advertising would be more likely to go to those people for whom it would be useful information. Or so the argument goes. This is discrimination, no doubt, but not the discrimination of Jim Crow. It is the wonderful sort of discrimination that spares me Nike ads.
But beyond a perhaps fleeting concern about how such data affect the individual, profiling raises a more sustained collective concern about how it might affect a community.
That concern is manipulation. You might be skeptical about the power of television advertising to control people’s desires: Television is so obvious, the motives so clear. But what happens when the motive is not so obvious? When options just seem to appear right when you happen to want them? When the system seems to know what you want better and earlier than you do, how can you know where these desires really come from?
Whether this possibility is a realistic one, or whether it should be a concern, are hard and open questions. Steven Johnson argues quite effectively that in fact these agents of choice will facilitate a much greater range and diversity — even, in part, chaos — of choice[28]. But there’s another possibility as well — profiles will begin to normalize the population from which the norm is drawn. The observing will affect the observed. The system watches what you do; it fits you into a pattern; the pattern is then fed back to you in the form of options set by the pattern; the options reinforce the pattern; the cycle begins again.
A second concern is about equality. Profiling raises a question that was latent in the market until quite recently. For much of the nineteenth century in the United States economic thought was animated by an ideal of equality. In the civil space individuals were held to be equal. They could purchase and sell equally; they could approach others on equal terms. Facts about individuals might be known, and some of these facts might disqualify them from some economic transactions — your prior bankruptcy, for example, might inhibit your ability to make transactions in the future. But in the main, there were spaces of relative anonymity, and economic transactions could occur within them[29].
Over time this space of equality has been displaced by economic zonings that aim at segregation[30]. They are laws, that is, that promote distinctions based on social or economic criteria[31]. The most telling example is zoning itself. It was not until this century that local law was used to put people into segregated spaces[32]. At first, this law was racially based, but when racially based zoning was struck down, the techniques of zoning shifted[33] .
It is interesting to recall just how contentious this use of law was[34]. To many, rich and poor alike, it was an affront to the American ideal of equality to make where you live depend on how much money you had. It always does, of course, when property is something you must buy. But zoning laws add the support of law to the segregation imposed by the market. The effect is to re-create in law, and therefore in society, distinctions among people.
There was a time when we would have defined our country as a place that aimed to erase these distinctions. The historian Gordon Wood describes this goal as an important element of the revolution that gave birth to the United States[35]. The enemy was social and legal hierarchy; the aim was a society of equality. The revolution was an attack on hierarchies of social rank and the special privileges they might obtain.
All social hierarchies require information before they can make discriminations of rank. Having enough information about people required, historically, fairly stable social orders. Making fine class distinctions — knowing, for instance, whether a well-dressed young man was the gentleman he claimed to be or only a dressed-up tradesman — required knowledge of local fashions, accents, customs, and manners. Only where there was relatively little mobility could these systems of hierarchy be imposed.
As mobility increased, then, these hierarchical systems were challenged. Beyond the extremes of the very rich and very poor, the ability to make subtle distinctions of rank disappeared as the mobility and fluidity of society made them too difficult to track.
Profiling changes all this. An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank. Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past. Think about frequent flyer miles. Everyone sees the obvious feature of frequent flyer miles — the free trips for people who fly frequently. This rebate program is quite harmless on its own. The more interesting part is the power it gives to airlines to discriminate in their services.
When a frequent flyer makes a reservation, the reservation carries with it a customer profile. This profile might include information about which seat she prefers or whether she likes vegetarian food. It also tells the reservation clerk how often this person flies. Some airlines would then discriminate on the basis of this information. The most obvious way is through seat location — frequent flyers get better seats. But such information might also affect how food is allocated on the flight — the frequent flyers with the most miles get first choice; those with the fewest may get no choice.
In the scheme of social justice, of course, this is small potatoes. But my point is more general. Frequent flyer systems permit the re-creation of systems of status. They supply information about individuals that organizations might value, and use, in dispensing services[36]. They make discrimination possible because they restore information that mobility destroyed. They are ways of defeating one benefit of anonymity — the benefit of equality.
Economists will argue that in many contexts this ability to discriminate — in effect, to offer goods at different prices to different people — is overall a benefit[37]. On average, people are better off if price discrimination occurs than if it does not. So we are better off, these economists might say, if we facilitate such discrimination when we can.
But these values are just one side of the equation. Weighed against them are the values of equality. For us they may seem remote, but we should not assume that because they are remote now they were always remote.
Take tipping: As benign (if annoying) as you might consider the practice of tipping, there was a time at the turn of the century when the very idea was an insult. It offended a free citizen’s dignity. As Viviana Zelizer
