There's nothing particularly new in technology to make profiling easier. The relatively simple databases necessary to store this information are not that difficult to search, so it does not require particularly fast computers. It was easily doable in the 90s, which is why grocery stores started handing out those cards in the 90s.
Modern technology just lets them do it with fewer computers, so it's a little cheaper.
We use internet now for Banking, filling out Government and Health Care Forms...making Dentist, Doctors appointments online , purchases from Amazon and others online..EBAY and the rest.
All of that was computerized in the 80s. The fact that you talked to a person who typed it into a computer doesn't matter.
And we E-mail and Skype with friends or relatives overseas.
And you used to call them on the phone. Remember the metadata scandal? That technology dates from the 1960s.
we may not even know who can watch everything we say and even look at where we've been with the Google Mapping of us..all there on Facebook.
Or more likely, we simply don't care. I use that little supermarket card. I use Facebook to distribute baby pictures to the mountain of relatives that want them. Google has gobs of data on me, because I find it a convenient place to store that data.
And I don't think that's a threat to my privacy. I'm one tiny blip among hundreds of millions. There's no reason that someone would use this data to follow me specifically and not someone else. Is my privacy utterly destroyed? Nope. Far from it. There's just too much data in the system to violate my privacy personally. And if there was a reason for the government to look after me personally, they already had the tools to get that information a very long time ago.
People compare our current situation to a sort of "Andy Griffith Show"-style past and insist that we had more privacy then. Far from it. To stick with the supermarket example, your grocer back then knew a hell of a lot about you even without the help of a computer. He knew when you were sick. He knew how many kids you had and how old they were, even if you didn't bring them to the store. He could probably figure out if someone was having an affair. He knew a hell of a lot about you without the benefit of computers.
Today: customer 47389421647 bought condoms and cough medicine. That's way more real privacy, because nobody gives a damn who customer 47389421647 actually is. A database query will decide to send out coupons for more condoms without a human looking at the data.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for that!
