Advertising, fake, marketing, science fiction, surveillance, web

Creepy Corporate Data-Sucking Machines of the Future

It's time to monetize your datastream. You're generating all this data while you surf the web: what you buy, what you read, where you work, where you vacation, your current favorite music/video, where you bank, and of course what you're talking about in email. Shouldn't there be some way to commoditize all that? I mean, shouldn't you be putting all your personal web data together into a handy UDP, or unified data profile, and selling it to the highest bidder? Absolutely. And in the year 2024, a nice company called Datapoints wants to help you to do just that. The Datapoints site, written in hilarious biz-speak, is one of the only deliberately science fictional corporate websites I've ever seen.

Here's what you'll get from this fictional company:

The DATAPOINTS Active Privacy® System allows members to control who sees and analyzes their unified data profile (UDP). In return DATAPOINTS® members receive an ongoing income stream based on the detail, purity and 'interestingness' of their UDP.

Of course there's a kiddie version, so you can start selling your kid's UDP. And then there are a lot of peripherals you can buy to spice up your UDP. For example, there's the home retinal verification scanner.

A kind of dystopian mashup of Choicepoint and Google, Datapoints comes from a future where Big Brother has been privatized and made "fun." If you're irritated by corporate-speak and web industry jibber-jabber, you've got to check this out.

Datapoints [corporate website]

2:40 PM on Mon Mar 24 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,131 views
7 comments

Comments

BloggyMcBlogBlog at 02:54 PM on 03/24/08
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Are we sure Google doesn't do this already?
dOk at 03:30 PM on 03/24/08
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Ok...
I want one of those handy-dandy disinformation generators.

Which I think our current president has already, although it seems to go on the blink all the time though.
Mister Adequate at 04:40 PM on 03/24/08
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I'd rather be able to sell my information than simply have it taken from me, so... I'd consider this a step up.
All_Thumbs at 06:34 PM on 03/24/08
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Great find, love the site. Immediately made me think ofrd of 'passive RPGs'. They basically are a way to sucker people into giving up all they do on the web for free. So yeah, not doing that, kthnxbai.
noncornbatant at 09:48 PM on 03/24/08
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It'll probably come sooner than 2024. I bet profile fraud/profile defense will be a major problem/boon.

Of course in reality this is already going on, albeit the transaction is not monetary (at least in your direction): this is the business model of almost all "web 2.0" applications (Google is just the biggest and most obvious).
corpore-metal at 10:10 PM on 03/24/08
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@noncornbatant:
Yeah, looking at that site, I can only think, "Ha, ha, only serious." With the amount of money and brain power being invested in this by the marketing weasels it will happen a lot sooner than 2024.

It's really sad how we've just resigned ourselves to this increasing intrusion of advertising into our lives. It was not so long ago in the 20th century where ads were rare in public spaces and now they are practically on everything.

It's not exactly a thrilling and dangerous SF dystopia but it's sad none the less.
Annalee Newitz at 10:18 PM on 03/24/08
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Connectedness Index: 344

@noncornbatant: Yeah, and for a while there was even a real company that tried to get you to sell them your "clickstream." It was called Attention Trust. If only this website were fake: [attentiontrust.org]