Data Mining:
How Companies Now Know Everything About You


By Joel Stein

10.03.2011
Illustration by Joe Zeff for TIME

Three hours after I gave my name and e-mail address to Michael Fertik, the CEO of Reputation.com, he called me back and read my Social Security number to me. "We had it a couple of hours ago," he said. "I was just too busy to call."

In the past few months, I have been told many more-interesting facts about myself than my Social Security number. I've gathered a bit of the vast amount of data that's being collected both online and off by companies in stealth — taken from the websites I look at, the stuff I buy, my Facebook photos, my warranty cards, my customer-reward cards, the songs I listen to online, surveys I was guilted into filling out and magazines I subscribe to. (See pictures of a Facebook server farm.)

Google's Ads Preferences believes I'm a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn't care about "books & literature" or "people & society." (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes and beauty products; it also thinks I live in New York, even though I moved to Los Angeles more than six years ago. Alliance Data, an enormous data-marketing firm in Texas, knows that I'm a 39-year-old college-educated Jewish male who takes in at least $125,000 a year, makes most of his purchases online and spends an average of only $25 per item. Specifically, it knows that on Jan. 24, 2004, I spent $46 on "low-ticket gifts and merchandise" and that on Oct. 10, 2010, I spent $180 on intimate apparel. It knows about more than 100 purchases in between. Alliance also knows I owe $854,000 on a house built in 1939 that — get this — it thinks has stucco walls. They're mostly wood siding with a little stucco on the bottom! Idiots.

EXelate, a Manhattan company that acts as an exchange for the buying and selling of people's data, thinks I have a high net worth and dig green living and travel within the U.S. BlueKai, one of eXelate's competitors in Bellevue, Wash., believes I'm a "collegiate-minded" senior executive with a high net worth who rents sports cars (note to Time Inc. accounting: it's wrong unless the Toyota Yaris is a sports car). At one point BlueKai also believed, probably based on my $180 splurge for my wife Cassandra on HerRoom.com, that I was an 18-to-19-year-old woman.

 

RapLeaf, a data-mining company that was recently banned by Facebook because it mined people's user IDs, has me down as a 35-to-44-year-old married male with a graduate degree living in L.A. But RapLeaf thinks I have no kids, work as a medical professional and drive a truck. RapLeaf clearly does not read my column in TIME. (See 25 websites you can't live without.)

Intellidyn, a company that buys and sells data, searched its file on me, which says I'm a writer at Time Inc. and a "highly assimilated" Jew. It knows that Cassandra and I like gardening, fashion, home decorating and exercise, though in my case the word like means "am forced to be involved in." We are pretty unlikely to buy car insurance by mail but extremely likely to go on a European river cruise, despite the fact that we are totally not going to go on a European river cruise. There are tons of other companies I could have called to learn more about myself, but in a result no one could have predicted, I got bored.

http://www.time.us/

Religion's Secret to Happiness:

It's Friends, Not Faith

By Alice Park

12.12. 2010

Religion can be good for your health, and especially your mental health, according to the latest studies, which show that church-goers are happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who don't attend services. But what exactly is it about religion that is so beneficial to health?

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Some might argue that it is the power of faith in a being or power beyond ourselves. But according to a study led by Chaeyoon Lim, a sociology professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the reason religion makes us happy may have more to do with friends than with faith. (More on Time.com: Retirement May Make You Happier, Depending on Where You Retire)
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Using data from the Faith Matters Study, a survey of U.S. adults conducted in 2006 and 2007, Lim and his colleagues found that 33% of those who attended religious services every week and reported having close friends at church said they were extremely satisfied with their lives, while only 19% of those who went to church but had no close connections to the congregation reported the same satisfaction.

As Lim noted in a statement describing his findings:To me, the evidence substantiates that it is not really going to church and listening to sermons or praying that makes people happier, but making church-based friends and building intimate social networks there.”
The results support the idea that friends and acquaintances can have a powerful, even contagious effect on our health. In other work conducted by Dr. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard Medical School and John Fowler of University of California, San Diego, it's clear that our social network, regardless of how close or distant we are to the people in them, can influence our health. Christakis and Fowler showed that even people separated from you by up to three degrees can influence your weight, your happiness, or even whether you quit smoking or are prone to loneliness.
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A version of that idea of social connectedness may explain Lim's findings, which were consistent across Protestant, evangelical and Catholic religions; they applied to Mormons and Jewish believers as well, despite their smaller sample size in the study. Lim stresses that the sense of community that religion promotes is an important part of helping people to feel involved and worthwhile, and therefore may contribute to an overall sense of happiness.

www.time.com/

COVER

Looking Back to the Future

The end of history? More like the start. The 21st century runs on fast-forward, and the only way to keep up is to stop and figure out what really happened

By Nancy Gibbs
24.11.2010

Life felt fine in 1999. Crime had fallen, stocks had soared, the Treasury was running a surplus, and we asked Who Wants to Be a Millionaire several nights a week. Our worries came down to this: Were there bugs in our computers that would bring our happy little worlds crashing down on us precisely at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999? "Millennium Countdown: Whole planet of apocalyptic possibilities — starting with Russian power stations," ran a headline in the London Independent.
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We thought we got a reprieve. "Just Y2Kidding," announced the Bergen County, New Jersey, paper, as the lights stayed on, banks didn't fail, planes didn't fall from the sky, cities didn't tumble into the sea. At least, not right away. It took more time for the bubbles to burst and markets to plunge and cities to drown, for faith in institutions to collapse — the banks, the court, the church, the intelligence community, the press and finally the government, which nearly 1 in 3 people now say they "almost never" trust to do the right thing.
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But that is only half the story. As the mighty were falling, the lowly were able to rise, in the most immense devolution of power from institutions to individuals in all of human history. We're swapping careers as old industries die, retraining, networking, self-branding, writing apps. The constant hustle is less secure but more exhilarating: you want to be a crime fighter, a software engineer, a video star, a music sensation, a day trader, an entrepreneur, a journalist — the gatekeepers have had to hand over the keys.
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The first decade of the 21st century moved so fast that it was easy, as the poet said, to have the experience but miss the meaning. It's hard to find the truth about the age of truthiness, of truthers and birthers and reality customized by ideology. So TimeFrames is our attempt to stop the clock, slow down, look back, see what comes into focus only from a distance. We know what happened in the past 10 years. But what really happened? Who gained power, and who lost it? Who's richer? Who's poorer? Who were the visionaries? Who were the rogues? And how do we find the music or the meaning in the noise of the news?
www.time.com/

LEI TALIBÃ

31.07.2010

A revista Time traz na capa desta semana a fotografia de Aisha, uma jovem afegã, de 18 anos, a quem foram cortadas as orelhas e o nariz por não respeitar as regras talibãs e ter fugido da casa da família do marido.

Aisha conta que era constantemente espancada e tratada como uma escrava. Mesmo assim, a história não foi o suficiente para convencer um comandante talibã e enquanto o cunhado de Aisha a agarrava, o seu marido cortou-lhe as orelhas e o nariz.

A fotógrafa da Time, Jodie Bieber, quis fotografá-la mostrando a beleza da mulher. “És mesmo uma mulher bonita. Não compreendo, nem imagino o que possas sentir quando tens o nariz e as orelhas cortadas, mas o que posso fazer, e mostrar-te, é a tua beleza nestas fotografias”, disse a Aisha.

O trabalho mostra a situação das mulheres naquele país e defende a permanência das tropas americanas no local. No editorial da revista americana lê-se que a reportagem pretende também: “convencer os americanos sobre o que os EUA e aliados deveriam fazer no país”.

Hoje em dia Aisha está escondida e protegida por guardas. A organização não governamental “Women for Afghan Women” (Mulheres pelas mulheres afegãs) ajuda-a financeiramente. Uma organização humanitária da Califórnia quer levá-la para os EUA para que possa ser submetida a uma cirurgia de reconstrução da face.
www.ionline.pt/

...

AFEGANISTÃO - UM ENIGMA E QUATRO HIPÓTESES

Por José Luis Fiori

Outras Palavras *
30.07.2010

“Whenever western leaders ask themselves the question, why are we in Afghanistan, they come up with essentially the same reply: “to prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state and haven for terrorists”. Yet there is very little evidence that Afghanistan is coming stable. On the contrary, the fighting is intensifying, casualities are mounting and the Taliban are becoming more confident”
Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, 26 de junho de 2010

A superioridade numérica e tecnológica das forças americanas e da OTAN, com relação aos guerrilheiros talibãs do Afeganistão, é abismal. No entanto, a situação estratégica dos EUA e dos seus aliados, depois de nove anos de guerra, vem piorando a cada dia. Em apenas um mês, o presidente Obama foi obrigado a demitir, por insubordinação, o famoso general Stanley McChystal, que ele havia nomeado, e que era o símbolo da “nova” estratégia de guerra do seu governo.

E agora enfrenta um dos mais graves casos de vazamento de informação da história militar americana, com detalhes sanguinários sobre ação das tropas, e acusações de que o Paquistão – seu principal aliado – é quem prepara e sustenta os guerrilheiros talibãs.

Depois do envio de mais 30 mil soldados americanos, em 2010, a situação militar dos aliados não melhorou; os ataques talibãs são cada vez mais numerosos e ousados; e o numero de mortos é cada vez maior. Por outro lado, o apoio da opinião publica americana e mundial é cada vez menor, e alguns dos principais aliados dos EUA, como a Holanda e o Canadá, já anunciaram a retirada de suas tropas, com própria Grã Bretanha sinalizando na mesma direção.

Faz algum tempo, o general americano, Dan McNeil, antigo comandante aliado, declarou à revista alemã Der Spiegel que seriam necessários 400 mil soldados para ganhar a guerra, e talvez por isto, quase ninguém mais acredite na possibilidade de uma vitória definitiva. Por outro lado, o governo do presidente Hamid Karzai está cada vez mais fraco e corrompido pelo dinheiro da droga e da ajuda americana, a sociedade afegã está dividida entre seus “senhores da guerra” e o atual Estado afegão só se sustenta com a presença das tropas estrangeiras.

Por fim, a luta contra as redes terroristas e al-Qaeda de Bin Laden também vai mal, e está sendo travada no lugar errado. Hoje está claro que os talibãs não participaram dos atentados de 11 de setembro, nos EUA, e estão cada vez mais distantes da al-Qaeda e das redes terrorista cuja liderança e sustentação está sobretudo, na Somália, no Yemen e no Paquistão.

E quase todos os estrategistas consideram que seria mais eficaz a retirada das tropas e o rastreamento e controle a distância das redes terroristas que ainda existam no território talibã. Resumindo: a possibilidade de vitória militar é infinitesimal; os talibãs não defendem ataques terroristas contra os EUA e não dispõem de armas de destruição de massa; e não existem interesses econômicos estratégicos no território afegão.

Por isto, a guerra se transformou numa incógnita, para os analistas políticos e militares.
Do nosso ponto de vista, entretanto, a explicação da guerra e qualquer prospecção sobre o seu futuro requerem uma teoria e uma análise geopolítica de longo prazo, sobre a dinâmica das grandes potências que lideram ou comandam o sistema mundial, desde sua origem na Europa, nos séculos XV e XVI. Em síntese:

1. nesse sistema mundial “europeu”, nunca houve nem haverá “paz perpétua”, porque se trata de um sistema que precisa da preparação para guerra e das próprias guerras para se ordenar e expandir;

2. nesse sistema, suas “grandes potencias” sempre estiveram envolvidas numa espécie de guerra permanente. E no caso da Inglaterra e dos EUA, eles começaram – em média – uma nova guerra a cada três anos, desde o início da sua expansão mundial;

3. além disto, este mesmo sistema sempre teve um “foco bélico”, uma espécie de “buraco negro”, que se desloca no espaço e no tempo e que exerce uma força destrutiva e gravitacional sobre todo o sistema, mantendo-o junto e hierarquizado. Depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, este centro gravitacional saiu da própria Europa e se deslocou na direção dos ponteiros do relógio: para o nordeste e sudeste asiático, com as guerras da Coréia e do Vietnã, entre 1951 e 1975; e depois, para a Ásia Central, com as Guerras entre o Irã e o Iraque, e contra a invasão soviética do Afeganistão, durante a década de 80; com a Guerra do Golfo, no início dos anos 90; e com as Guerras do Iraque e do Afeganistão, nesta primeira década do século XXI.

4. deste ponto de vista, pode se prever que a Guerra do Afeganistão deverá continuar, mesmo sem perspectiva de vitória, e que os EUA só se retirarão do território afegão quando o “epicentro bélico” do sistema mundial puder ser deslocado, provavelmente, na mesma direção dos ponteiros do relógio.

Foto Pål Berge
* Outras Palavras é a nova versão do boletim de atualização do Le Monde Diplomatique, agora vinculado à Biblioteca Diplô e o site Outras Palavras.
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