How much does “big data” know about you? Thanks to commercial data aggregator Acxiom, you can find out: the “data giant” has decided to make a large portion of its information public via a new website, Aboutthedata.com. The New Republic contributor Paul Rosenzweig explained the significance of the company’s revelations in a Monday post:

Acxiom is one of the largest commercial, private sector data aggregators around. It collects and sells large data sets about consumers (sometimes even to the government). And for years it did so quietly, behind the scene—as one writer put it ‘mapping the consumer genome.’ Some saw this as rather ominous; others as just curious.  But it was, for all of us, mysterious. Until now.

Rosenzweig created a profile on the site, and was able to see Acxiom profile of his tastes and life. While he found the purchase and household interests rather boring and “un-illuminating,” the personal history “insights were at least moderately invasive of my privacy, and highly accurate.” All the same, Rosenzweig was not perturbed by his data profile. “…When I dove into one big data set (albeit only partially), held by one of the largest data aggregators in the world, all I really was, was a bit bored.”

Curious, I also created a profile. Unlike Rosenzweig, the company was more correct on my purchasing preferences than my personal history. (They thought I had a child and a truck. I have neither.) I didn’t feel that they knew me considerably well at all—and was quite pleased by that fact. But the website triggered a different question in my mind, separate from (legitimate) privacy concerns. On the Aboutthedata.com’s home page, they posit this claim: “We [consumers] no longer want to receive mass marketing – getting bombarded with ads that have no relevancy to our lives – because it’s intrusive and wastes our time. That’s why companies want to use data about you to personalize and shape your experiences with them.”

Companies are increasingly “personalizing” their advertising in an effort to buy our attention. Online advertisers increasingly shape consumer profiles to garner users’ time and money. But what are the detriments and dangers of such attention economics? Tom Chatfield elaborated on in an Aeon Magazine piece entitled “The Attention Economy.” He includes an interesting quote from David Auerbach of N+1 Magazine:

Because computers cannot come to us and meet us in our world, we must continue to adjust our world and bring ourselves to them. We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand’. Their dumbness will become ours.

“In computing terms,” Chatfield continues, “To do things in a way the system does not ‘understand’ is to do nothing at all. It is to be incomprehensible, absurd, like trying to feed a banana instead of paper into a printer … All of which seems to place immense power, not to mention responsibility, into the hands of the system architects: the coders, designers, advertisers, professional media manipulators and social media gurus devoted to profitable clicking.” In the world of computers, our personalities become a list of quantifiable assets. These profiles thread their way through a gamut of advertising and media websites, all spitting out the information they think you want. Your personality, whether on Acxiom or Facebook, is little more than code.

Acxiom argues that this information makes our interactions with companies “more personal.” But according to Chatfield’s perception, nothing could be further than the truth. The computer’s algorithms and filters cannot handle the complexity of human individuality and eccentricity. Instead, the information they give us is geared toward a cartoon-like image of ourselves—and frighteningly, we may slowly shape ourselves into that image: “Where is the space, here, for the idea of attention as a mutual construction more akin to empathy than budgetary expenditure—or for those unregistered moments in which we attend to ourselves, to the space around us, or to nothing at all?”

I do not want to be the sort of person continually solicited with makeup ads or reading the latest Hollywood scandal. I click on such things very rarely, and usually regret it. But computers cater to such momentary inclinations—they cater to our “want,” never our “ought.” They seize our time in bits and pieces, in 140-character tweets and harmless two-minute Youtube videos. Chatfield puts it beautifully:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

It matters little whether Acxiom thinks I have a truck and a baby. But its perception of me as a profile— as an attention commodity—can be very harmful. If I let it.

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