A friend of mine worked for Acxiom, and when they looked themselves up they found 6-7 different profiles, all fantastically wrong, some clearly mixed with information from other people.
Admittedly it's a very private person that I'm talking about who deliberately obscures themselves by leaving incorrect or misspelled information when forced to give any information, and who moves, switches jobs often, has an odd name, and changed that odd name through marriage. But I think that a lot of us are falling for the marketing of these intelligence companies, rather than judging them by predictive effectiveness because we don't have any access to that.
There's no real theory of mind behind all of this stuff; it seems to be that it will only ultimately be effective for creating black/whitelists where you don't care about a lot of false positives.
> A friend of mine worked for Acxiom, and when they looked themselves up they found 6-7 different profiles, all fantastically wrong, some clearly mixed with information from other people.
With my tin foil hat on tight, maybe they create shitty profiles on all their employees so they don't get freaked out and run for the hills!
I assume in terms of "how did they know this about me?" a la Tom Cruise being advertised a particular brand of alcohol based on an automatic eye-scan whilst walking through a public space ["Minority Report"].
I used to be "creeped out" about this about 10 years ago. Now-a-days I am not.
To be honest, a part of me wants this type of thing. I'm all for exploring knew products and "discovery" and so forth. However, if the "Check out this product you just bought" problem could be solved, I'd be chips in for "Hi User, check out this neighbouring product" should that actually be relevant; Amazon is almost OK for example, but that's an "almost ok".
Extreme Example: If I don't drive and have less than zero interest in sports cars, why would or should I get ads for a Ferrari? Today, I have no doubt I'd receive such an ad for somebody's giggles on the penny. Tomorrow, I dream not to.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...