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Magazine Eyeballs Its Subscribers
No_Weak_Heart writes "Talk about 'know your customers' -- the NY Times has an interesting article about Reason Magazine's upcoming June issue. Each of the print magazine's 40,000 subscribers will receive a copy of the mag with their name and a satellite photo of their home on the cover!" Although described as a "cover stunt", the magazine's editor "said that the parlor trick could have profound implications as database and printing capabilities grow."
This is your rights online? I guess it must be a slow newsday. It might be useful for showing John Q. Public exactly how powerful these systems have become but somehow I doubt that will happen. The article even states this:
On the flipside I suppose this justifies my paranoia in continuing to use a P.O. Box for all my mail. And to think I only got the P.O. Box because I was worried about my neighbors stealing my mail. I wonder if my copy would have the Post Office circled?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
BFD. I routinely get the coordinates for addresses (usually geocaches but sometimes business addressses and residences) and make both standard Mapquest maps and aerial/topo maps of the location. Terraserver is quick and easy to use if you don't have access to some of the scripts out there for this...
How does this have far reaching implications? The information is freely and easily accessible. As databases grow? The information is out there now... It's not exactly as if magazines selling your name/address to others is a new/novel idea. It's been going on for ages.
Perhaps if they had your name and your CURRENT, exact, location on file I would be more concerned...
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real. Therefore, I would not say this is a gimmick, but that it would enforce the idea to those who may not think as much in their daily lives the issues of privacy and information customization and product dissemination to consumers.
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The magazine's trick here really isn't that hard... in that for every subscriber they of course have an address, and adresseses can be converted to geographic coordinates using the same technology MapQuest has had for years. It's just a matter of getting a satellite photo that shows that coordinate as the center point, and applying the circling to the image. After that, it's just a typical variable printing job.
Modern printing technologies make it very easy for a 40,000-subscriber magazine to send out a different cover to each and every subscriber. It's just a matter of doing a 40,000 page run of each of the "customized" sets of pages with the image database available, and then the common pages can be wrapped around after printing them the typical way. Here's the homepage for VIPP, Xerox's technology for doign such "variable data" printing jobs on its industrial class printing products.
I think the point is some people don't think about/realize that the ability to integrate information like that is so easy.
Plus its pretty damn cool they can demand print the magazine covers.
Obviously its a stunt, though... anyone who subscribes to a libertarian magazine probably understands those issues anyway... its a rallying call for them.
The problem with this stunt is that it is a harbinger of things to come. When marketers are able to fully customize each page of a magazine to appeal to a particular consumer, they will acquire a lot of personal information from tens or hundreds of different marketing databases in order to do so.
In essence, the improvements in printing technology that made this possible will contribute to the proliferation of your personal information.
The only way to solve this is to implement EU-style privacy protections at the Federal level. We need to ask ourselves - who's looking out for you? It's obviously not our government.
There is Constitutional "right to privacy". Some try to conjure one out of the Ninth Amendment, but the same tactic can be used to conjure a "right to security" or something else that cancels it out. Some try to conjure it out of the 4th Amendment, but it is a real stretch to apply this to information that is hundreds of miles from your house and person.
I think there should be a "right to privacy", but it just isn't there in the Constitution. Judges who conjure one out of thin air can just as easily make it go away. For such things, we should rely on the amendment process, not the fickle imagination of judges.
Ostensibly, the main idea was to make readers more aware of the realities of living life as a row in a database. But then there's Chief Editor Gillispie's closing quote: "What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you? That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read." This seems to indicate a conflict of interests; that Reason recognizes the peril, but can't help but consider the possibilities of catering to individual readers by exploiting personal data.
Of course, this attempt at pandering generally fails in my experience. My being interested in 'Gardening' or 'Outdoor Life' is lightyears away from wanting a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens or Sports Illustrated, personalization or no. This is due to the critical distinction between essence and product.
The phrase "Free Minds, Free Markets" also seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, although "Free Markets" leaves room for interpretation. I guess I'm reading this wrong, because to my mind, the notion of individuality resists the concept of demographic marketing, no matter how "free."
Any opinion you like, as long as it's capitalist extremism.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This will make it all the more impressive when your home's photo is on your cover anyhow.
I doubt it's that hard to cross your PO box with a dozen other databases. Do you use a different box for your Reason account than for other mail? Have you ever given anyone your current geographic address?
Face it, in this modern world it's only a few minutes for a determined adversary from any piece of identifying info to lat/long for the incoming ordinance.
The resolution doesn't look very good based on the photo. Looks like very coarse black and white photo? Old weather satillite data? So what?
It doesn't like like 1m resolution, color, recent photos. This is like the weatherman getting up and circling your city and saying "we know where you live".
BFD.
That'd be a magazine that only you wanted to read.
terraserver.microsoft.com. Big deal.
The only worthwhile topic of this article is that printing technology has come down to a point where they can print a customized cover for every subscriber. Now that's amazing.
What happens if you're a subscriber but your copy has the house & name of someone else? Isn't that against some kind of privacy law for which NY Times could potentially be sued?
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