Buying patterns of customers and su

Buying patterns of customers and suggest individual responses. The use of computer to combine data from multiple sources and create electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals is called profiling.
For example, several thousand of the most popular Web sites allow DoubleClick (owned by Google), an Internet advertising broker, to track activities of theirs visitors in exchange for revenue from advertisements based on visitor information DoubleClick gathers. DoubleClick uses this information to a create profile of each online visitor, adding more detail to the profile as the visitor access an associated DoubleClick site. Over time, DoubleClick can create a detailed dossier of a person’s spending and computing habits on the web that is sold to companies to help them target their Web ads more precisely.
ChoicePoint gathers data from police, criminal and motor vehicle records; credit and employment histories; current and electronic and previous addresses; professional licenses; and insurance claims to assemble and maintain electronic dossiers on almost every adult in the United States. The computer sells this personal information to business and government agencies. Demand for personal data is so enormous that data broker business such as ChoicePoint are flourishing. In 2011 the two largest credit card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., were planning to link credit card purchase information with consumer social network and other information to create customer profiles that could be sold to advertising firms. Visa processes 45 billion transactions a year and MasterCard process 23 billion transactions. Currently, this transaction information is not linked with consumer internet activities.
A new data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) has given both the government and the private sector even more powerful profiling capabilities. NORA can take information about people from many disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone records, customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships to find obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists (see Figure 12.2).
NORA technology scans data and extracts information as the data are being generated so that it could, for example, instantly discover a man at an airline ticket counter who shares a phone number with a known terrorist before that person boards an airplane. The technology is considered a valuable tool for homeland security but does have privacy implications because it can provide such a detailed picture of the activities and associations of a single individual.
Credit card purchases can make personal information available to market researchers, telemarketers, and direct-mail companies. Advances in formation technology facilitate the invasion of privacy.