I Am Not a Number
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
I have a confession to make. A few years ago, I attempted to obtain a credit card for my cat.
I know what you're thinking, but please don't jump to any conclusions. Really, I wasn't planning on allowing him to run up furtive Meow Mix charges. Honest.
In fact, I wasn't planning on accepting the card -- I was simply hoping he'd be offered one.
This totally innocent experiment was similar to others I'd performed over the years. I've been known to sign up for magazine subscriptions, and the like, using subtle variations on my own name, then taking a certain amount of amusement in the buckets of junk mail that would soon begin to arrive, addressed to people who don't quite exist.
Okay, so maybe I'm far too easily entertained.
For a long while, I've found this to be one of the more curious features of our highly databased society. Once some computer somewhere latches onto a name and address, that person, real or fictional, is automatically drafted into the great consumer army -- an army that marches on its credit.
With that thought in mind, I subscribed to a very nice mailing list in the name of Diogenes Stone. Diogenes the cat.
Diogenes had no real job and no income. And he wandered around the neighborhood pretty much as he pleased, so I suppose he had no fixed address, either. In other words, Diogenes was the perfect credit risk.
In the weeks and months after adding his name to the list, I waited for the preselected credit card offers to appear in our mailbox. And I waited.
Alas, none ever materialized -- and for a long while, I wondered where I'd gone wrong. It all seemed so simple.
Now I know why our cat was never offered a credit card, and the answer is more than a little disquieting.
In recent months, we've begun receiving bulk mail addressed to San B. Ventura -- including, you guessed it, several preselected credit card offers. Nothing too unusual so far, except that nobody by that name lives here. In fact, I'd wager that nobody by that name lives, period.
Ah, but we do own a business called San Buenaventura Research Associates. I can only surmise that a bored data entry operator working in some windowless office in Dubuque decided that San Buenaventura Research Associates was a pretty implausible name for a person -- and so conjured up our new associate, Mr. Ventura.
You know, like Jesse?
So why are the banks, who were reluctant to extend credit to a very real cat named Diogenes, now falling all over themselves to issue credit cards to the entirely inadvertent San B. Ventura?
It's really quite simple. San B. Ventura owns one magical ingredient that Diogenes lacked: a credit history. Ours.
As a chip off our very own block, San B. Ventura almost certainly shares something else with us -- our Taxpayer Identification Number, the business equivalent of a Social Security Number.
Once these synaptic connections were established, the mythical Mr. Ventura became fully animated -- as a sort of digital Frankenstein monster. Not only is he a living being, so far as the banks are concerned, but in all probability, he shares our consumer preferences, travel patterns, eating habits, and any other information gathered about us by banks and other corporations, and then aggressively cross-referenced for marketing purposes.
These are all elements of what Simson Garfinkel calls our "digital dossier." In his recently published book "Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century" (O'Reilly and Associates, 2000), Garfinkel chillingly describes the trail of data we leave behind us as we navigate our way through life. Credit card purchases, ATM withdrawals, phone calls, student loans, driving records -- you name it, somebody is collecting it.
What's more, our digital dossier probably includes numerous factual errors, which for ourselves, almost certainly now includes San B. Ventura. And although we are legally entitled to view our credit history, we're essentially powerless to correct any erroneous entries.
Further, the contents of most of these databanks remain entirely off-limits. We never get to see them at all, says Garfinkel. In effect, we are who these databases say we are.
Under the circumstances, we can only hope that San B. Ventura keeps his nose clean. Hmm, San B. Ventura -- sounds like a pretty good name for a cat, don't you think?
06 March 2000 |
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