marketing "privacy": a nonproblem?

["William R. Ward" <hermit@bayview.com>]

Vladimir Nuri writes at length about an anonymous system for getting
on marketer's lists, so that they can target people who want to buy
widgets without having to compile a "dossier" on everyone to determine
who might want a widget.

The problem with this is that finding a list of widget-buyers is not
the only reason marketers collect these "dossiers"... They also do it
to sell/rent the information to other marketers, who may be selling
Thingamajigs or widget related services or something else entirely --
and the information which is extraneous to the widget marketer is
quite useful to the thingamajig vendor or other companies, and selling
that information is profitable for the marketing firm.  This is
probably one reason companies outsource marketing a lot, to take
advantage of the databases they have compiled on the consumers.

Mr. Nuri's scheme is wonderful for cypherpunks; we only get the junk
mail that isn't junk to us (since we're actually interested in widgets
or whatever they're selling), and they don't get to compile a
"dossier" on us.  However it isn't as wonderful for the marketers as
he suggests, or they would already be using such a scheme.

One of the most important tasks for marketers is how to find new
customers, who have never heard of widgets.  For this they need
information on customers to find who might like a widget; if you have
heard of a widget and signed up on Mr. Nuri's list, then that's fine,
but for the rest of us who don't even know what one *is* much less
whether we want one, the marketers need to do their traditional
dossier system.

The Net doesn't really change anything here.  We've had anonymity
through email and telephones for a long time.  But *we* have to call
*them* in order to get on the anonymous widget consumer's list using
Mr. Nuri's system; traditional marketing techniques proactively search
out consumers to get them on the list.

All that aside, I certainly would prefer it if the world worked in a
way to make Mr. Nuri's system practical -- I dislike having "dossiers"
on me kept by every marketer in the world, and do not like unsolicited
advertising, but I just don't believe that we live in that sort of
world.

--Bill Ward