Emotionally Sensitive Information Used For Marketing

This article reveals that many companies could be using your emotionally sensitive data for unabashed marketing purposes. It describes a man who received junk mail addressed both to him and "Daughter Killed in a Car Crash". A poignant quote from the article:

Neither OfficeMax nor the unnamed vendor explained how information about a teenager’s death ended up in a dataset used for marketing purposes. But Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum (a nonprofit group based in San Diego), told the Times that companies collecting and merging enormous volumes of public records has resulted in datasets full of death, disease, and tragedy: “There were probably other people on that list that lost their children in car accidents, and we probably haven’t heard about them, and [Seay] just had the gumption to take it public.”

 It makes me wonder how many other real people have been targeted by careless automated ads. Companies need to be more discerning and have more sophisticated methods in place for dealing with emotionally sensitive data if they wish to use it for marketing purposes, if indeed they use it at all. If it was used, it should be used to help make the marketing companies more sensitive, such as withholding ads for a month surrounding the tragedy.

Technology Should Be Embraced

Here in Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, we are told implicitly that technology is something that can damage cultures, and that we should keep our eyes wide open for technology which is "not prepared" to operate in the presence of that new technology. I say that if something newly invented would annihilate a culture, then that culture isn't doing enough for the people who are in that culture. A culture which is, for example, built around an old technology, say a scroll, and which would break in the presence of a new technology, say an e-book, is focusing on the wrong things. The founders of cultures always used the best technology available when founding traditions. We should not be afraid to update those traditions.