Numerati Baker, Stephen. (2008). The

Numerati Baker, Stephen. (2008). The numerati. Boston: Mariner Books. Big Brother is watching you: in cyberspace as you Google, at the grocery store when you swipe your loyalty card for a discount on toilet paper, and even at the doctor's office, where we are given sensors to 'spy' on ourselves and our loved ones to make sure we do not forget critical health data between appointments (Baker, 2008, p. 154-156).

Our lives are increasingly data-driven, and our privacy is being increasingly violated -- for the good of marketers, and for our own good. This is the central contention of Stephen Barker's book the numerati. Once upon a time, people were terrified that big government would accumulate massive stores of information on the lives of citizens.

Now individuals are ceding such information willingly, sometimes unwittingly, to large corporations as well as to other massive, faceless bureaucracies Canny marketers study what web surfers buy, what types of news sites they prefer (liberal or conservative), and what type of ads appeal to specific demographic groups. The amount of data that is available about what a consumer wants is seemingly endless. What is so insidious about this trend is that some of it appears to be helpful to consumers, so there is little resistance.

Shoppers are seduced into using loyalty or rewards cards for small discounts, which enables stores to keep track of consumer purchases and to do free market research for the store. Consumers with similar buying habits are demographically 'matched' so that they can be targeted with suitable advertising. For example, Democratic cat lovers who are concerned about the environment and buy organic produce can be the recipients of one type of advertising, while Republican gun owners who buy fast food can be the recipient of another (Baker 2008, p.84).

Perhaps the most beneficial use of such data from a consumer perspective is manifested in the tracking medical patient's vital signs, through heart monitors and blood pressure machines. The data can be transmitted to doctors and nurses in their offices.

But even this practice may have a potentially negative consequence: what if the data is wrong? What if this information is used to entirely to supplant human contact? What if the data gets into the wrong hands and is used to deny someone adequate healthcare? The promise of the ability to track numbers in such a specific fashion is that it will improve our lives by making medicine, shopping, and news information more personalized.

But such obsessive monitoring and cataloging of data also has the potential to make things more impersonal, reducing human beings to numbers. As a result patients might lose higher-quality care, even any kind of healthcare at all, because their data is used to speak for the sum of their entire humanity and health. Rampant market segmentation also can make us less cohesive as a society, as we receive differently-positioned campaign advertisements, coupons, and even medical care.

The title of Baker's book refers to the mathematicians responsible for 'crunching' the data collected by machines, the numerati who try to make such private data meaningful. A skilled numerati "can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site….[or] become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. [in one example] among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings.

That makes sense… 'Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car'" (Baker, 2008, p.1). Some correlations between data-driven behaviors seem less explicable than this obituary-car example, such as the strange pattern of romantic movie lovers who also surfed rental car websites. But a possible theory can be tested for this unexpected trend: "A broader trend, a correlation between romance and travel, lust and wanderlust. That could lead to all kinds of advertising insights," even though it could just be a coincidence (Baker 2008, p.3).

The result could be a cutting-edge campaign for a rental car company stressing romance and danger, rather than safety and budget-conscious effectiveness. No company wishes to miss out on the next new marketing trend, and all want to find the next 'hot' new connection between two seemingly discordant interests or types of behaviors. One idiosyncratic, accidental click or glance is meaningless, but being able to keep track of large amounts of data makes such decisions is significant for market researchers, as a consistent pattern can be drawn.

And the blog world of online journalism is an even more willing source of "unfiltered immediacy" for marketers, who can track what types of blogs generate the largest amount of traffic for specific types of ads. Blogs are especially useful because marketers can contextualize the data with qualitative as well as quantitative information, based upon the blog entries and responses of commentators (Baker 2008, p.101). The implications of data-tracking go beyond selling soap: terrorists often leave specific data trails that can be tracked by the government.

but, because they too have grown up in an 'information age' where the Internet is ubiquitous, they can be just as canny at avoiding leaving a trail. And in some instances, regarding this very important subject, data-gathering falls as laughably short as human analysis: Computers failed to find Osama bin Laden in different languages, given its different spellings in different languages (11 in Chinese alone) (Baker, 2008, p.148).

Some consumers may shrug, of course, and doubt the possibility that their data can be useful to marketers, and say that this type of screening of their private data means little to them. Advertising is advertising, and whether segmented or not, these types of consumers presume themselves to be immune. However, it is worthy of note that some of the most well-respected news sites on the web today have used mathematicians to make their advertising more effective.

One data-based market research company "has struck deals with thousands of online publications, from the New York Times to BusinessWeek," dropping "a bit of computer code called a cookie into our computers" to trace.