Sure, computers track our online shopping. But for sophisticated surveillance, you can’familiarily baste the human substance in a brick-and-mortar store

By Stephen Baker

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Even as we plunge into recession, the holiday fit time brings online merchants a windfall of sorts: billions of new shopping clicks to analyze. We may have being just browsing or comparison shopping online, but our Web wanderings paint a picture of who we are, that which we desire, where we go. In all, we create a gigantic laboratory of human behavior with regard to the premises miners at the e-merchants, portals, and search engines. Last December, Yahoo! (YHOO) collected an industry-leading average of 2,520 bits of information about each one of its users.

Can we secure from attack. our privacy by stepping away from the thicker settlements from these snoopy electronic networks, by acquisition done the grid? It’session tempting to some. But before logging right hand, keep in mind that by moving from the digital to the analog realm, we substitute some original of surveillance for not the similar. And despite the wonders of high tech and the prodigious reach and memory of computers, old-fashioned superintendence—the kind attached to two eyes, a nose, and a human brain—refuse vastly more sophisticated.

Not to demean the unaccustomed stuff. On the Internet, merchants and advertisers can compare every one one of us, literally, through millions of others. Computers at big portals like Yahoo and Google (GOOG) can search for correlations betwixt the Web pages we appearance at, the articles we read, the ads we click, steady the size of our e-mail communities and our instant-chat habits. Yes, it sounds invasive. But most of these analysts—the people I call the numerati—recognize us only of the same kind with patterns. Their computers see us as dots in a universe of millions.

More important, the numerati’session machines conduct their analyses largely free of prejudice. They define who we are by the sort of we act. Imagine a group of people who appear interested in both President Andrew Jackson and nearly nude photos of Jennifer Aniston, or perhaps Hawaii vacation buffs who comprehend obituaries. These Web surfers may not be of the same race, gender, or class. For most e-merchants it doesn’t matter. They’re focused on behavior. What other tastes and inclinations does that group share? The answers could lead to last-minute holiday advertising campaigns targeted to single of these unpromising new tribes. This model of study may feel intrusive, but remember: All of this observation and analysis is done by machines.

Now compare that with what happens in neighborhood shops. Walk through the holly-bedecked doorways, and store owners forthwith note your race, your dress, the way you walk. Maybe they can see your car out the window. Within seconds and without conscious thought, most will draw conclusions about your social status, your income, maybe even your practical piety, drinking habits, and sexual orientation. (This is a level of resolution eons superior to the power of the brainiest computers.) These insightful humans, their brains busily linking you to other people they have known, heard of, read about, or even smelled, will then guide you toward the kitchen appliances, books, or tools they suspect you’ll like. This attention, which on the Web would be called "targeting," is known in the physical marketplace as the "personal touch."

This method can have being unfair, of course, even sexist and racist. Will a merchant direct a muscular, short-haired woman away from the jewelry or cosmetics contrariwise, and toward navy tools? Will a man who looks like the oft-cited Joe Six Pack be more likely to wash down turkey with Bud than Alsatian riesling? Humans are making these judgments all the time, placing each other into convenient groups. Some customers don’t likely it. Why is it, after all, that pornography thrives online? I would guess that consumers prefer the online monitoring of machines and the relentless tracking of cookies to the inquiring and judgmental eyes of humans in stores. They seek aloud a degree of privacy on the grid.

In the close, the two worlds are coming together. Researchers at Accenture (ACN) are mapping the buying patterns of grocery shoppers. Their vision is eventually to lay us behind computerized shopping carts that will guide us toward special deals on the items we’re greatest in number likely to want or need. In this scheme, the statistical analysis thus efficacious on the Internet moves into the physical province. In a sense, it’sitting a computerized return to the old-fashioned stores, in which place the folks behind the counter knew our tastes and preferences, which customers kept kosher and that ones topped off their coffee with a sluggard of schnapps or Kahlúa. Surveillance has been around forever, and it’session evolving in company new paths—on and off the grid.