Shed a tear for the marketeers of the last decade: technology had finally provided the ability to bombard a billion people with the same advertising message, but in most cases no one wanted to listen.
Marketing is that area of modern commerce where highly paid experts work out how to create personal dissatisfaction which can then be only partially satisfied by their particular product. Anything from poorly sized drink containers to cars with built-in obsolescence is probably planned by a marketeer (as in "racketeer") somewhere.
Advertisers can pitch the product at us, but it takes a marketeer to decide to sell a sweet drink (which by definition cannot quench thirst) to a thirsty audience.
By the 1990s, marketeers had discovered that just bombarding a billion people with the same advertisement doesn't work, and visions of global satellite television creating the universal market evaporated.
Then came the World Wide Web, a marketeer's dream. Each user surfing their favourite sites leaves a ghostly trail of evidence. There are companies today, such as Engage (<http://www.engage.com>), that track the surfing habits of tens of millions of individuals.
Have you ever noticed that an advertisement on a site you visit relates to something you have previously looked at? For example, you might spend time looking at a fishing site, then later on you are looking at a news site and an advertisement for fishing equipment pops up.
This is their dream, and it has a name: the mass market of one. Every single person is to be profiled and advertising targeted at them individually (by a computer, of course).
This is a significant invasion of privacy, so the companies involved "guarantee" that they are not connecting your viewing details with your name. For example, they claim to record you as "anonymous user number 1234, interested in X, Y and Z, surfs at such and such a time, likely to look at that type of advertising, spends less than 20 seconds on each page on average, prefers search engine AltaVista", rather than "Greg Harris".
The technology to track you is woven into the web. "Cookies", short pieces of information, are sent to your computer constantly to mark you as having previously visited a site. That's why when you get back to a site you have already visited it can recognise that you have already viewed certain pages of the site.
The heart of your computer is the central processor unit, or CPU, with Intel as the leading manufacturer. A year ago Intel "helpfully" announced it would put unique identifiers into every CPU it made (and received a broadly hostile reaction). Other characteristics of your computer, such as its network address, can also be used to help identify you.
While commercial organisations are bound by privacy legislation in Europe and sort of bound by codes of conduct Oelsewhere, government organisations have no similar limits. It would be highly surprising if any major security organisation in the world wasn't similarly collecting this information and linking it to people's names.
The only sad note in this happy story is that marketeers are still having trouble selling to internet users, who prefer email, chatting and surfing to passive consuming.
BY GREG HARRIS