How Stupid Do They Think We Are? Pt II

IN Jon Ronson's second book of collected Guardian stories and columns, there is a section entitled "How stupid do they think we are?". It begins with the story of the Cullen family, specifically Richard Cullen, who committed suicide after racking up £130,000 of debts by trying to beat the credit card people at their own gain.

It began with a £4,000 loan, for the purpose of paying for surgery for Richard's wife. But, for whatever reason, Richard became addicted of sorts, paying off credit cards by taking out another loan on another card. The "Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan" junk mail kept coming, so Richard kept playing, and the debts kept spiralling.

In his investigations of why people like Richard Cullen suffer from such problems, or specifically why people like Richard Cullen are targeted by credit card junk mail, Jon meets the people behing Mosaic. This is a computer program used by 50,000 businesses, including credit card companies. It identifies post-coded areas based on the backgrounds of the people who live there. It categorizes people. It identifies who should be targeted with what kind of junk mail. In essence, it tries to guess, by your postcode, how stupid you are.

Richard Cullen wasn't stupid. However:

The Cullens, it turns out, belong to Mosaic's Group B11: "Happy Families: Families Making Good." These are "older people on middle incomes ... not high fliers up career ladders of large conglomerates". Neighbourhoods like this are "hardly centres of intellectual or aesthetic style". Happy Families are "likely to be interested in adverts for financial products". "This is a culture," concludes Mosaic, "that is keen to take advantage of easy credit."

I don't intend here to repeat the whole story. What I want to do instead is express my concern at the existence of Mosaic, the web of data collection that exists behind our backs, through innocent surveys, mailing lists, mail-orders, internet-orders and Nectar cards. Almost everything we do is monitored - and though this isn't for some 1984-style government form of control and is instead for capitalist purposes ("this person typically buys/attends/reads this, so let's market this to them"), it is extremely unnerving. We are told to be security conscious, but even with our best efforts to be so (and I fear I'm particularly bad at this) it really wouldn't take much to find out even the finest details about ourselves.

Take our passports - you don't need a country stamp to have left a trail. Your passport has a number, and databases like numbers.

In London most people are on Oyster cards for travel. With the exception of buses, each card knows where you get on and where you get off. Look at it for long enough and you can probably work out where somebody lives, works and visits regularly (you would at least know that they're not at home). Couple this information with a bank statement, for example, and you'd know all of this for sure. Thank goodness banks don't share statement details (or at least I hope they don't).

Store cards are another thing - they show your spending habits, your purchase preferences and your credit history. And store cards are recorded on databases - visit a mobile phone shop and they will know which clothes shops you have pledged allegiance to.

There isn't really a conclusion to this blog. I suppose it is just me ranting about something I should have realised ages ago. I can try and hide as much as I like, but someone, somewhere, could easily guess what I'm doing.