by Boddhisatva Troutwaxer (tungtung@pacbell.net)
There's a lot of fuss being made these days about the birth of Christ. I'm not referring to the upcoming holiday, but to the "Millennium" celebrations that everyone from car dealers to our national news magazines are insisting that we celebrate right now this year. The cover of Life magazine promised us that it would discuss "2000 Years of Christianity..." while Time, the week after, had a front cover which maintained that Christ was 2000 years old. In calendrical terms, these headlines were completely incorrect, as is every other piece of millennium hype, but they offered an opportunity to get the sacred, stuff selling "2000" on the front page one more time... sigh.
Last night I walked past the news rack at my local Giganto Uber-Market and was asked by the assistant manager whether I had a Giganto Uber-Market Discount Card. "No." I told her, "I don't."
"Would you like to get one?" she asked, you could win a Volvo or free groceries, and it gets you discounts on some of our products."
"No thanks," I answered, "I'm just too well educated on the subject of computers, privacy rights, and data mining to want one."
"But we don't sell your data." Now she's looking at me like I might be just a little weird.
"There's no law that forbids you from doing so." I answered, thinking back on a couple of cases the banks won recently, where their right to sell some very sensitive customer data was upheld by separate judges despite the fact that in at least one case the banks had promised that they wouldn't do so. "There's no law against it." the judge had ruled, though I'm sure he said so in much more sophisticated legal language. So what does this conversation have to do with the date of Christ's birth? Trust me, I'll get there.
Most people know that we count time from the year of Christ's birth, and the average person on the street will tell you that Jesus will indeed be 2000 years old on January 1st. They would, of course, be dead wrong. To begin with, estimates of Jesus' actual birthday range a few years each way from 0 BC, so depending on who's right the correct age of Christ could range from (broadly) 1990 to 2010 years old. (At least Time acknowledged this - I didn't have a chance to read the Life piece) That's really a moot point. The more important issue is the fact that the date we use is exactly one year off. You see, the people who decided to start our calendar with the birth of Christ were lacking an important mathematical tool - the zero. If I were Tom Robbins I would sing an ode to its empty roundness, but as mere latter day cynic let me simply note that the medieval priests began counting with the year one. Not the year zero - after all, a new born baby won't be one year old for another year - but with the year one, as if all the time baby Jesus spent waking his mom for midnight snacks, or learning to crawl, or making cute baby sounds just didn't happen at all.
Our culture doesn't talk about this much. To loudly and publicly say we're wrong about such an important date, or even to (gasp) change our calendars in acknowledgment of such a major blooper would be a terrifying retreat from our greatly lessened, but still immensely strong pro-European bias. We would have to acknowledge that we weren't the first to do everything, that two cultures we destroyed (the Arabs and the Maya) were, by virtue of their knowledge of the "zero," among other things, our intellectual superiors and that they would have counted the all important dates correctly when we could not have done so!
Worse than the miscounting of the correct date for the millennium is the assertion on the cover of Life magazine that Christianity is (or will on January 1st be) 2000 years old. Once again, ask on the street. I suspect that the average man will agree with this date. To do so, however, shows a lack of critical thinking. The bible assures us that Christ started his ministry at the age of 33. Subtract that from 2000? We get 1967. Take away a year for the lack of a zero in old European arithmetic? We get 1966. Take away yet another year due to the fact that it's still 1999? Christianity is 1965 years old. Alternately, I suppose that one could calculate the date from the year that John the Baptist started baptizing people in preparation for the coming of the messiah, because we at least have a doctrine and one ritual practice (baptism) but let's at least reason logically from some facts.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not attacking Christianity, nor do I feel that I'm being disrespectful of Jesus, who was fully aware that the devil is in the details, and who just might like to have the right number of candles on his cake. What I'm thoroughly upset with is the total lack of regard for the facts that I'm seeing here, and the total lack of critical thought on the part of John Q. Public, which brings me back to the subject of the "Discount" Card.
You see, when you run your card through the scanner, Gioganto Uber-Market (fill in the name of any big grocery or drug chain) is able to link each thing purchased with a particular person, phone number, or address. Sometimes the form you fill out to get the card asks for your occupation, age, social security number or driver's license number. The company collects a huge amount of very valuable data about you and your family this way, and they pay for it by giving you deep discounts on selected items - the total discount on any given bill seems to be about ten percent, (that's a rough guess based on watching other people at the register) which amounts to hundreds of dollars for a family during any given year. So why is a market willing to pay this much? Just so they know how many bags of canned prunes to re-order to keep their shelves stocked? Sorry, wrong answer, they've been tracking that with the bar-code scanner since the seventies. Maybe they want to create a brand identification by giving you a discount card with their name on it? Lets be real. Everyone shops at the nearest market to their house with decent fruit in the produce section.
The real answer is much more frightening. What they want, in essence, is to sell your profile to as many buyers as possible. "Can you give us the names and addresses of people who've bought at least five publications at your store?" asks a "book club?" "Where are people who've bought products designed for children?" The people at a big "toy chain" want to know. It all sounds kind of benign at first. Everybody gets something - you get the low prices, the market gets information to sell, and the marketers get to send you junk mail about stuff you might actually want to buy!! It's the best invention since they started printing adds on the register tape!! But as Jesus might say, ruefully shaking his head at a cake with one candle too many, "The devil is in the details."
Add it up. If you do the shopping for a family of four, you're probably spending upwards of one hundred dollars a week. That's more than five thousand dollars a year, and they're giving you ten percent off. If you really think this big business is willing to lose five hundred dollars a year on each of its millions of customers just to collect some data for internal use only I've got a nice bridge to sell you. A decent phone survey will tell them the same thing for considerably less money.
On the other hand, how much is that data worth in a one shot deal? It's worth damn little. How many times do they charge the "book club" or "toy store" fifty cents a head before they make a profit? I imagine they aren't very discriminating about whom they sell to...
So what does that mean to me? Well to begin with, I have three close family members with diabetes. I sure as hell don't want my insurance company tracking the number of cookies I buy. I've got two more close family members who've died of some kind of cancer. So I buy a lot of cookies and my purchase of vegetables is below average. Are my insurance rates going to go up again or what? Or worse yet, what if I actually got diabetes and sometime later sued my doctor for malpractice related to the disease? The market would have to answer a supeona with the requested information on my sweet and beer buying habits. And it could get much, much worse:
"Give us the Jewish surnames in your area."
"Who are the teachers that buy condoms from your store?"
"Give us the names of licensed drivers who purchase more than two quarts of hard liquor from your liquor aisle each week."
Oh yeah, one more little thing. There are companies that buy whole databases from places like your local market and then integrate them with the other five hundred whole databases they've already bought. Then they "mine" this data like it was raw ore, maybe even combine it with credit profiles, and by the time they've cross-referenced and cross-linked everything in all the databases, they know an awful lot about you and about people of your race, class and gender. They may even know more about you - what you buy and what you like - than you know yourself. It's the kind of product that the media, big business, political parties, big religion, three letter government agencies, and everyone you don't trust wants to buy.
All this being said, can I prove that the store you shop at sells their data? Of course not. My honest guess would be that some do and some don't. But even a shop that doesn't sell their data can "rent" it. Your market might charge someone a few cents to print out a coupon for Brand A to whomever buys Brand B. The nice thing about that is that a market can sell the same service to both brands. Or, just as irritating as if the giant store actually had violated your privacy, they can act as an agent to those who would like to do so. "Pay us a buck, and we'll send your catalog of computer accessories to those people who buy computer magazines." The effect is the same. The percieved violation would feel the same.
I like to think that the stores I buy from have some person who checks on these requests, makes sure that none of the data they send out unfairly targets an ethnic or medical minority, and that they don't sell to data miners. I'd also like to think that my European ancestors didn't have to kill thousands of Arab children to get the zero, and that we were educated enough to count the years from the birth of Jesus properly.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. As I walk away from the market, away from the news stand with the inaccurate headlines about Jesus, I think of what I might have said to the assistant manager who looked at me like I was a little weird. "Do you have a computer at home?" I might have asked her, "let me give you some key words to check on the Internet - its full of this stuff!!" But any good newspaper is full of this stuff, as is Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the free computer magazines from the news racks, The Discovery Channel, CNN, Wired... you grab a piece here and a piece there and put the facts together. Suddenly that discount card looks real expensive.
So what. The average person on the street doesn't have the critical thinking skills to figure out that how long ago the seminal event in our culture took place. All the facts are in hand, they know the math, but the cover of Life says Christianity is 2000 years old and no amount of ranting on my part is going to change anybody's mind.
I guess I'll go home and eat my cookies.
Privacy Information on the Web
This paper by Rex E. Gantanbein is an excellent place to start.
This site is a great source of news and philosophy on Discount Cards.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an enormous amount of information on online privacy.
Return to Main Menu