The business of data
Data is big business for the numerati. US firm Acxiom keeps shopping and lifestyle data on some 200 million Americans.
They know how much we paid for our house, what magazines we subscribe to, which books we buy and what vacations we take. The company purchases just about every bit of data about us that can be bought, and then sells selections of it to anyone out to target us in, say, political campaigns.
Much effort is expended finding new ways to gather data on people. A company called Umbria uses software to analyse millions of blog and forum posts every day, using sentence structure, word choice and quirks in punctuation to determine the blogger's gender, age interests and opinion. That knowledge can be a valuable tool to people launching new products, or politicians seeking votes.
Microsoft has filed patents for technology that monitors the heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, facial expressions of office workers, and even their brain waves.
The idea, the patents say, is to let managers know if workers are experiencing heightened frustration or stress. Given that the same technologies are used inlie detectors and to study human behaviour, it seems unlikely many workforces would quietly accept their boss introducing such a system.
Tags: data mining, Umbria
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