The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [17]
The dynamics of lock-in are described by Metcalfe’s law, a principle coined by Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet protocol that wires together computers. The law says that the usefulness of a network increases at an accelerating rate as you add each new person to it. It’s not much use to be the only person you know with a fax machine, but if everyone you work with uses one, it’s a huge disadvantage not to be in the loop. Lock-in is the dark side of Metcalfe’s law: Facebook is useful in large part because everyone’s on it. It’d take a lot of mismanagement to overcome that basic fact.
The more locked in users are, the easier it is to convince them to log in—and when you’re constantly logged in, these companies can keep tracking data on you even when you’re not visiting their Web sites. If you’re logged into Gmail and you visit a Web site that uses Google’s Doubleclick ad service, that fact can be attached to your Google account. And with tracking cookies these services place on your computer, Facebook or Google can provide ads based on your personal information on third-party sites. The whole Web can become a platform for Google or Facebook.
But Google and Facebook are hardly the only options. The daily turf warfare between Google and Facebook occupies scores of business reporters and gigabytes of blog chatter, but there’s a stealthy third front opening up in this war. And though most of the companies involved operate under the radar, they may ultimately represent the future of personalization.
The Data Market
The manhunt for accomplices of the 9/11 killers was one of the most extensive in history. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the scope of the plot was unclear. Were there more hijackers who hadn’t yet been found? How extensive was the network that had pulled off the attacks? For three days, the CIA, FBI, and a host of other acronymed agencies worked around the clock to identify who else was involved. The country’s planes were grounded, its airports closed.
When help arrived, it came from an unlikely place. On September 14, the bureau had released the names of the hijackers, and it was now asking—pleading—for anyone with information about the perpetrators to come forward. Later that day, the FBI received a call from Mack McLarty, a former White House official who sat on the board of a little-known but hugely profitable company called Acxiom.
As soon as the hijackers’ names had been publicly released, Acxiom had searched its massive data banks, which take up five acres in tiny Conway, Arkansas. And it had found some very interesting data on the perpetrators of the attacks. In fact, it turned out, Acxiom knew more about eleven of the nineteen hijackers than the entire U.S. government did—including their past and current addresses and the names of their housemates.
We may never know what was in the files Acxiom gave the government (though one of the executives told a reporter that Acxiom’s information had led to deportations and indictments). But here’s what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are righthanded or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) ... the list of data points is about 1,500 items long.
Acxiom keeps a low profile—it may not be an accident that its name is nearly unpronounceable. But it serves most of the largest companies in America—nine of the ten major credit