The Consumer Trap

Archive for August, 2010

Friday, August 6th, 2010

The March of Marketing Surveillance

Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.

For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:

The [WSJ] conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:

The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.

It is also increasingly powerful:

Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Obama Streamlining Car-Loan Rejection Process

President Obummer, ever the valiant, true-believing, prevaricating babysitter of the status quo, is presently touring the Upper Midwest, peddling the notion that his tragically stupid bailout of the doomed, massively downsized automobile industry is some kind of jobs program, rather than a desperate effort to stave off public consideration of Peak Oil and the radical unsustainability of capitalism.

Meanwhile, how’s this for an Obamian gesture?:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration wants to simplify auto loan forms for consumers over the next few months, a U.S. Treasury Department official said today.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin said the attempt to clarify car loan disclosures will be part of a broader administration effort to do the same for mortgages and credit cards.

The administration’s goal is “to help consumers get the information they need to make the choices that are right for them,” Wolin said in the text of a speech being delivered today at the New England Council in Boston.

ROFLMFAO. This is exactly, precisely the same sales proposition as the one at the heart of those scurrilous “know your credit score” commercials — the suggestion that ordinary people’s problem is ignorance or complexity or anything and everything but their shriveling incomes. Low and sinking incomes yield low credit scores and car-loan rejections. The form you have to fill out before being rejected is the pimple on that elephant’s ass. But that’s what these creeps are peddling as “change.” Zit cream for the rumps of social diseases.