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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.
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.
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.