HF wrote a recent message about the "doubleclick" advertising service. I don't know much about it but some things he mentioned sparked my neurons. regarding privacy, it seems that there are a lot of different views and specious arguments. we don't really have a clear idea in our culture what privacy is or when it is really being invaded. is it being invaded when marketers create databases of users and their preferences? this is a frequent topic of conversation here. if we are on the side that says "yes", it seems there is such an enormous industry pushing very hard from the other side that a so-called "pro-privacy" position is untenable. are marketers creating the equivalent of what TCM calls "dossiers"? I just had a brainstorm that perhaps the problem of marketing clashing with privacy is completely nonexistent. what marketers really want is to TARGET PEOPLE'S ATTENTION. they don't necessarily want to know who those people are!! a rather paradoxical situation, but the two are NOT the same. imagine that a marketer selling Widgets could send a direct mailing to people who have an interest in Widgets. now, currently what has to happen is that marketers have to collect info on various people and their interests, and then sort that for "widget interest" to get their mailing list. but the overall database is in a sense a dossier. but what we should note is that the marketer DOESN'T CARE at all about the real identity of the people he is mailing to. in fact it is totally superfluous. he only wants to send his literature to people who are interested in widgets, and he doesn't care who they are or their other interests. in fact, marketers keep track of "other interests" only insofar as they can be used to correlate with what they are actually trying to screen for. so what I am getting at is that I think "dossiers" tend to associate a lot of information about a real person, in a way that people can get info on that person given their name or whatever. the point is that marketers don't really care who is who, and don't really want to necessarily have a database that gives the real identity of people. they only need a way of delivering their literature to people with particular interests. let me give an example to clarify this. suppose a database existed somewhere that contained a total profile of me and all my interests. but I am not called "V.Z.Nuri" in the database, but #3343. furthermore, there is an "address" in that database, and it can be used to reach me, but it is unique to that database and can't be found in any other, and furthermore, no one can correlate that address with my real identity. voila-- the marketer doesn't really want anything more than this. yet in a sense my privacy is completely protected. suppose that police agent tries to query the database to get info on me. if it really is secure, all he has is info that can never be tied to me. such a system creates a very important use for anonymous remailers. of course digital cash plays a big role in this too. in the same vein, it is possible for me to "buy" something from a company without them knowing that it was in result to them sending information to so-and-so identity #3343. actually, it could be set up that I tell them, "I am responding to your direct mail ad campaign #1634" so they can gauge the efficacy of their advertising, but they don't know who of their database was involved. when I think of "dossiers" I think of info that can be tied to REAL PEOPLE. but it is quite possible to create an "interest distribution system" that would keep marketers happy but still not be able to be tied to people's real identities. when one thinks of the horrors of classic privacy abuse, one thinks of the way the Nazi's grabbed (Dutch?) records to find jews, or the way the NSA kept files on people and responded to Nixon queries for radicals. but it seems to me it would be possible to create a system in which people's interests are tracked, yet their real identities are dissociated from that information. furthermore, you can dissociate the mechanism to do so-- anonymous remailers have no connection to companies that deliver info through them. notice that much of the above can be achieved in cyberspace with the use of a pseudonym. if you are signed up through a provider that protects your identity (most of them do), then you can do whatever you want in cyberspace and theoretically nothing can be tied to your new identity. furthermore, if you think you have accumulated too much "baggage" associated with your current identity, you can always start afresh. === this will sound quite heretic, but I think marketing is actually a very legitimate business and that cpunks might actually achieve some of their goals by considering how to create a better marketing system. in essence, marketing is the attempt to match up people with information and products that interest them. in a way, this is a very similar problem to trying to match up people to mailing lists and newsgroups and articles/files that interest them. spamming is the cyberspatial equivalent of a problem that existed before cyberspace: junk mail, so to speak. is there an efficient system whereby suppliers and consumers can be matched up, but at the same time preserving privacy? it seems to me a key question of information technology, perhaps a "killer app" in this area is just now waiting to be born. that's all that marketers want, and in fact instead of seeing them as agents of satan, we should just see them as trying to fulfill customer desires with their own products-- the essence of capitalism. the fact that marketers in our culture are so aggressive speaks of how effective capitalism is. people see junk mail as "junk", but notice that the junk is in the eye of the beholder. what if you got on a direct mailing list that sent you info on products you were considering buying anyway? in a sense, "junk mail" is mail that we don't care about, not merely mail from marketers. we get mail from marketers all the time that we appreciate!! if someone can create a more foolproof system that preserves privacy at the same time, all worlds are satisfied. you have the marketer happy, the consumer happy, and the privacy protection too. as long as one tries to defy marketers basic drive of trying to target people with particular interests, I think this is fighting the wind or trying to stop the river. but if one could find a way of supporting their basic motivation, the scenario becomes totally transformed. building a marketing mechanism that preserves privacy may do far more for privacy protection in the future than a zillion remailers. I think the key is to analyze why people *want* to do things that seem to violate privacy (such as marketers), and then finding new ways of doing the same thing while preserving privacy, rather than trying to defy their basic drives (such as collecting information on potential customers etc.). === imagine a massive cyberspace system that was actually a database of everyone who wanted to register, containing their interests. it would be an accepted practice that all marketers could use this system. people would register if the system was actually effective in only sending them info that they really wanted to see. it would be like an index into the population the way Yahoo is currently an index into cyberspace. one could create guidelines and measures by which spamming could be minimized. the database might be able to minimize the effect of bad marketers and indiscriminate mailings etc. it seems like a very interesting problem worthy of attention. the returns for someone who could pull off such a thing would be tremendous. I continue to believe that many problems that people are insoluable or in eternal conflict, such as marketers and privacy, could be harmonized with some sharp ingenuity.