Technocreep

by Thomas P. Keenan

  The answer is “quite soon” according to Wilsonville, OR-based FLIR Systems, Inc., which is already taking orders for a sub-$350 add-on that turns an iPhone 5 or 5s into a thermal imaging device. Should this product succeed, peeking at your home with thermal imaging may fall into the “general public use” category.

  Most people associate drones with large, military-grade price tags. However, every summer for the past few years at the DEF CON conference, hobbyist drone makers have shown off their latest homemade UAVs with the ability to intercept your cell phone signals and Wi-Fi traffic. Made mostly of Styrofoam, and with password cracking and other penetration capabilities built in, the manufacturing cost of the 2011 version was about $6,200.161

  The use of aerial surveillance by law enforcement has seen a “function creep” from being used only in exceptional circumstances to being quite routine. According to a German research paper, police forces often feel justified in using drones in public places like sporting events because the fans have already consented to some degree of surveillance by entering the stadium and passing a warning sign.

  However, Peter Ullrich and Gina Rosa Wollinger argue that drones are really closer to covert surveillance than normal security cameras: “Drones are quiet, fly high, and can even be used at night time, if equipped with infra-red or thermal imaging cameras. All these decrease direct visibility and therefore the possibility for the affected persons to realize their being under surveillance, to act accordingly, or just to be able to calculate the consequences of their actions.”162 The average person seeing a small aircraft, manned or unmanned, flying over has no way of knowing what data it is collecting, and who is going to use it for what purpose.

  One of the most revelatory tales of retail tracking and data-mining is described by Charles Duhigg in a New York Times ­article called “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” He explains that Minneapolis, MN-based Target Corporation created a model to detect, as early as possible, when a customer knew she was pregnant. This would allow the timely marketing of high margin baby-related products. The model was created by a statistician named Andrew Pole.

  “About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model,” Duhigg reports, “a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

  “‘My daughter got this in the mail!’ he said. ‘She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?’”163

  It turns out that Target’s pregnancy-prediction algorithm had become aware of this young lady’s condition, from her purchases, before her father. He called the store manager a few days later with an apology. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August.”

  Duhigg quotes a Target corporate executive as saying “we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.” So, to avoid the creepy factor, Target started mixing in photos of things like lawn mowers and wine glasses with the baby items in its mailings to mothers-to-be.

  It is easy to imagine how this retail-tracking technology might evolve in the near future. Point-of-sale terminals could have cameras and sensors that read a customer’s body contours. Pregnancy would be easy to detect in this fashion, along with race, ethnicity, and body mass index. All could be used to target the customer with advertisements and coupons for the next visit.

  Peering further into the future, simply touching the keypad of the point-of-sale device might leave behind enough skin cells for a DNA sample to be collected.164 This could lead to genetic profiling, tied to the customer’s “Guest ID,” which is already on file. Now the store has a wealth of data, not just on the customer but also on close relatives. Based on what stores like Target are already doing, there is every reason to expect that they would adopt technologies like this, unless they are made explicitly illegal.

  Often, we enable tracking of our spending habits in return for discounts or points on loyalty cards. For example, two thirds of Canadian households have an active AIR MILES loyalty account. The points accrued on this can be used for everything from appliances to travel, and you are going to buy groceries or hardware anyway. The parent company of LoyaltyOne, the firm that runs AIR MILES, is Texas-based Alliance Data.165

  Once called the AIR MILES folks and asked them how much they know about me if I use their card at Safeway.

  “We know you spent $35.62 and got two AIR MILES.”

  “So you don’t know what I bought?”

  “Nope, but if you also use your Safeway loyalty card they know exactly what you purchased right down to the SKU.” In speaking to high school groups, I usually explain this with “they know you bought corn, cantaloupe, and condoms” which seems to make the point.

  Some might suggest dumping those cards, but they really have become de facto mandatory. Without the Safeway card, and its relatives at drugstores like Shoppers Drug Mart, Boots, Walgreens, CVS, and Duane Reade, you will wind up overpaying for your purchases compared to the person next to you.

  Often a kindly cashier will offer a “courtesy discount card or code” to overcome your lack of a card. Since the cards are free, they do not want to bother having you apply for one to get the discount. Safeway’s CEO, however, felt differently, ruling that no loyalty card meant no discount.166 Anecdotally, there are tales of cashiers swiping their own cards and benefiting from the points, even taking long vacations with them, though companies are now tracking that.

  Grocery purchases are not the only data being analyzed by machines. Now online job applications are also being screened in this fashion, such as the application to work at a Xerox call center.

  Some of the factors by Xerox used to predict if an employee will stay on the job are obvious, like living close to the workplace. But there are also stranger indicators. According to an article in The Economist, “people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.” There are even some findings that The Economist calls counter-intuitive. One example: “firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better.”167

  Consumers can turn technology against merchants. You will often see people in stores cross-checking prices with online retailers and snapping photos for comparison purposes. As object recognition and visual search engines improve even more, you will soon be able to snap a photo of a passing car, or somebody’s dress, and find it, at the best price, online.

  Still, the technology deck does seem to be stacked in the favor of corporations over consumers. A Canadian IBM employee, Nathalie Blanchard, had her disability payments revoked when her employer’s insurance company saw her online photos and decided she was having too much fun for a person on paid leave for major depression.168

  Manulife Financial stated that it would never cut off a claimant solely because of information posted on social media, but admitted it is a source that they do consider. When Blanchard posted photos of herself frolicking on the beach, she certainly wasn’t expecting them to be seen by her insurer. There is some debate about how private or public her Facebook profile was supposed to be, but it is probably not a good idea to “friend” your insurance company.

  Your friends may even have an impact on your personal credit worthiness. Start-up loan site Lenddo is open about the fact that they allow prospective borrowers to “use their social connections to
build their creditworthiness and access local financial services.” This translates into a “Lenddo score from zero to 1,000,” which they say “measures character.” It is based on an undisclosed combination of “social data, information from your community, and data related to your Lenddo products.”

  One thing is clear: you want to be careful who you hang out with online if you want a high Lenddo score. On its website Lenddo acknowledges that “You should be selective when adding members to your community. Members of your Trusted Connections should be people that you know and trust. Their Lenddo Scores are derived from their social data, payment behavior with Lenddo products; most importantly they impact your LenddoScore as their LenddoScores increase and decrease.”

  If all your Facebook friends are deadbeats, you will be looking at a very high interest rate, or no loan at all. What if you try to stiff Lenddo? Let’s just say they reserve the right to let your “Trusted Connections” on social media know all about it. And as your Lenddo score publicly plummets, you are dragging the scores of your friends down too.

  Does social media shaming work? An employee at a bar in Reno, Nevada, got so angry when a customer ran out on a hundred-dollar bar tab that he snapped a photo of the guy and it was posted on the bar’s Facebook page as a warning to other businesses that he was a “dine and dash artist.”

  The scoundrel wound up being arrested for other charges, and he promises to pay the bar tab someday—once he is finished serving his time. The story has gone viral, bringing the bar attention from people who will probably never set foot in Reno.

  What you post and who you hang out with on sites like Facebook may hurt your job prospects or get you rejected during school admissions. Six U.S. states have passed laws banning employers from demanding the social media passwords of employees or prospective employees. If you are hoping for admission to an Ivy League school or a new job, and you have posted naughty things on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Vine, you could of course just try to get rid of your online presence. But that is nearly impossible, say the experts. For one thing, you will live on in the postings of everyone you know. As Alan Katzman pointed out at Business Insider, “some (college applicants) have opted for a full social media lockdown or have simply changed the name on their Facebook profile. The risk of this approach is that colleges could rightly conclude that the lack of a social media presence means the applicant has something to hide.”169

  How you appear on social media can even influence whether or not someone will buy you a free lunch. Webinars have emerged as the dominant way to “educate” people about the finer points of new technologies. Of course they are usually “sponsored” which means you get to learn a lot about some vendor’s products. To get you to attend, they usually offer incentives, often a trinket like a flash drive or USB charger for your car.

  IT industry firm Condusiv Technologies raised the bar in October 2013, offering to buy your office a pizza in return for listening to their online pitch. They even offered to “include gratuity for the delivery person so there is no cost to you.”

  Since Condusiv wouldn’t want to send pizzas to people who do not appreciate the subtleties of “I/O Optimization Techniques,” they included a disclaimer reserving the right to refuse a pizza to anyone. But how would they tell a CIO from a janitor, when both might have a company email address? “We use LinkedIn to audit job title reflecting IT responsibility,” they explained in their invitation email. If your profile says your skills include “Dinosaurs” or “Towels” or “Medical Marijuana” (real examples from a collection assembled by Mashable), there will be no pizza for you.170

  So, before you solicit gag endorsements for Embroidery or Guinea Pigs or Dangerous Drugs (other real examples from that collection), you might want to think about who can see it. Information that you provide in one context, even in jest, can be used to form judgments about you in totally different and unanticipated situations.

  Sometimes you do not even have to provide the information. It is accumulated automatically and shared without your consent or knowledge. When I first heard about Zoominfo, an online aggregator of information about people, I immediately went there and found myself. It showed my current professorial position, and even reminded me of some old projects that I had completely forgotten about. However, it also named me as a director of a Virginia-based Aerospace company and said that I taught at Bard College. Neither of these claims were true, so I claimed the profile in 2008 and corrected it.

  I decided it would be fun to see what information they had back then on the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen J. Harper. I was astounded to see him listed with the title “Campaign Director.”

  Campaign Director is a long way from Prime Minister of Canada. Zoominfo was using old information, and Harper had not yet “claimed” his profile, which you do by providing Zoominfo with a credit card that matches your profile name. They do not charge the card, at least for their basic service, but they do use it for identity confirmation. I mentioned Harper’s profile in some Canadian government circles and soon his profile was claimed and updated.

  Another under Mr. Harper’s “Employment History” reveals how Zoominfo “thinks.” Some news reporter, or blogger, apparently wrote about “Stephen Harper, the somewhat reluctant leader of the Conservative” party and the site’s “patented” technology dutifully used that as his official title. It gets even worse. I logged on once and found him listed as the “Odious Leader of the Conservative Party.”

  You can actually use Zoominfo to play an interesting game of “find my doppelgänger.” Aside from the well-known Tom Keenan at Bard College, I now know that other Tom Keenans run a beverage ­company in Portland, a trucking company in Illinois, and a Foundation in Australia.

  There is a Tom Keenan who teaches at an elite private school in New York City. Not only do we share a name, our email addresses are very similar, and so I know a disturbing amount about his private and professional life. I frequently get emails of the “dog ate my homework” variety from his students. I did finally have to call him when the Parents’ Association at his school erroneously published my email as the contact for an upcoming “career day.” I had Park Avenue neurosurgeons and Wall Street tycoons mailing me their confidential resumes as potential guest speakers.

  There are three basic steps to handling information: input, processing, and output. So far, we’ve looked at how some creepy information systems suck up information about us as their input and process it, often to our detriment. Yet the creepiest technologies may be the ones that output their data, directly into our bodies and our minds.

  Sensation Creep

  Walk into Kelly’s Steak House in Las Vegas and you might find ­yourself instantly hungry for one of their signature dishes. Their secret? A frying pan full of delicious smelling, though probably inedible, onions, mushrooms, and spices simmering near the maitre d’s podium. Realtors running open houses routinely toss bread in the oven to put you into that “let’s buy a cozy new home” frame of mind. Shopping malls that are plagued with loitering teenagers have been known to chase them out with piped in classical music.

  We usually think of these tactics as just clever business practices. However, science is being pressed into service in whole new ways, usually to get us to buy or at least crave something.

  McCain, the dominant producer of all things potato in Canada, has infested a series of U.K. bus shelters with gigantic baked potatoes. According to a report in Advertising Age, “a hidden heating element warms the fiberglass 3-D potato and releases the aroma of oven-baked jacket potato throughout the bus shelter. The aroma was developed over three months in collaboration with a specialist scent lab.”171

  Specialist scent lab? Actually, there is nothing new about that. In the 1970s, I was sent to interview an elegant executive at the posh Manhattan offices of Charles of the Ritz. They had just introduced a home accessory called “the Aromance Aroma Disc Player.” It accepted little round “scent discs” and, using heat and a fan,
filled your home with aromas like “Romance,” “Fireplace,” and “Movie Time,” which smelled like buttered popcorn. Our chat was going along predictably until something provoked me to ask if they were working on any offbeat smells like, say, “Wet Dog.” A pert wiggle of Ms. Charles-of-the-Ritz's shoulders told me this was the logical end of the interview. This product only survives as a nostalgic posting on the Internet.172

  As we now know, they were definitely on to something—a creepy technology to get inside our minds. Neuroscientists say that the sense of smell is extremely effective at evoking memories and emotion. Anyone who has packed up the effects of a deceased parent has probably experienced the power of smell. The effect even has a name, the “Proustian Phenomenon,” after the passage near the start of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past where the protagonist dips a cookie into tea, and a rush of childhood memories spews forth for the next 3,000 pages.

  We are often unaware how we are being manipulated by scents until we catch ourselves moving over to the more expensive products or walking like a zombie into a restaurant we had planned to pass by.

  Scent manipulation even shows up in funeral homes, which use a special industrial-strength cinnamon spray for odor control around decomposing bodies. A blog post by Sabine Bevers also reveals other tricks. She claims that Apple doctors its product packaging to emit a standardized “new device” smell, regardless of the product that is packed inside. Holiday Inn reportedly alters the sensory environment for different kinds of function bookings—pumping rose scent into the air for weddings and leather for business meetings. Bevers exposes a Brooklyn, NY grocery story for piping bogus bread smells into the air, and suggests that casinos use different scents to attract their preferred clientele. She also claims that “Nike stores use a mixed flower scent to direct you towards the more expensive shoe designs.”173