The Numerati Know Everything About You

The Numerati
Stephen Baker
Emerging Technologies Conference, MIT
12:30pm today

Stephen Baker's new book, The Numerati, is a chilling tale of the folks who track the data of our lives, recording everything from the websites we visit to the groceries we buy, and analyzing that information to make generalizations about different demographics--what brands are we loyal to? what words affect our decisions? As the Portfolio review put it, "To the man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail. To the Numerati, our every breath becomes a nail for digital marketing." But Baker's concerned that the Numerati will move on to more than marketing, and attempt to identify us as political threats or even terrorists. When do the Numerati cross the line, and how can we protect ourselves? We talked briefly with Stephen about the book before his speech today.

Who are the Numerati?

The Numerati are the people who dig through immense mountains of our data on a mission to find us, understand us, and predict our behavior. Most of the Numerati master the mathematical and computer tools to find the fragments of our lives--the websites we visit, the calls we make--and to piece us together as shoppers, voters, patients, and potential terrorists.

You mention that Democrats have cats (Democats?) and Republicans have dogs. Data like this may be interesting, but are they useful in any way? How so?

Cats and dogs are merely one piece in the mosaic of a voter. Alone they're not terribly predictive. But if the Numerati, by analyzing our data, can come to an understanding of what we care about most, politicians can reach us with finely honed pitches. They only use these microtargeting techniques as they fight for the last percent or two in the tightest races.

Do the benefits of technology outweigh the drawbacks, like loss of privacy?

This is an an early stage. For now, the benefits are mostly in areas like advertising and marketing, and the privacy invasions, I would say, are minimal. But as the Numerati ramp up their efforts in medicine and counterterrorism, we're going to be facing stark choices.

More about the Numerati's attempts to infiltrate your mind after the jump.

You offered an interesting comparison between "making" voters and making mole (which we hear is one of Barack Obama's favorite foods). What are some of the data you've seen become lost beneath the "chocolate" flavor (so to speak) of more important data?

A lot of the "hidden" data is the classic stuff, which doesn't seem new or surprising. Party affiliation is a. Much better predictor of voter behavior, for example, than dogs or cats in the household.

Are the Numerati good, evil, or neutral? Or impossible to define?

They are people who try to understand you in order to sell you goods and services and, at the workplace, wring more production out of you. They might cure you of a disease or, through misreading your data, implicate you in a crime. So I'd say both. An apparent goal of the Numerati is to automate data collection.

Do you think we'll ever get to a point where a human eye is not needed to interpret information?

I would say that we'll always be happy to have sight, and sorry to lose it, even if we come up with other ways of gathering data.

Facebook is a good example of the phenomena you discuss. When some of the newsfeed features debuted, people freaked out about invasion of privacy. But now we log on just to see what people are up to. Do you expect that we'll become more accustomed to additional invasions of privacy?

I think we'll come up with new definitions of privacy. We already see this from one generation to the next. [Born Digital authors Urs Gasser and John Palfrey have more to say about privacy; we'll be covering their presentation later today. --Ed.]

Does what the Numerati know really define who we are? Or is there more to us than numbers could ever hope to represent?

They provide definitions that serve a purpose in the marketplace. They'll never understand each one of us in all of our complexity.

What (if anything) can we do to protect ourselves against the Numerati, short of chucking our laptops and adopting a hermitlike lifestyle? Can we insert false data to scramble the system, and is that even worthwhile?

They can figure out how to adjust for false data. I'd say we should entrust certain companies with our data, and try to shut out the rest.

If you're lucky enough to be attending EmTech08 at MIT today, you can hear Stephen speak over lunch. The rest of us will have to buy the book.