We got our electricity bill today; our provider announces on the envelope that it is now a member of Nectar.

Opening the envelope, we see that we have been sent a registration form, that gladly declares:

The form has your customer account number on it, and your post code under the space where you sign and date.

Now, if a national ID card scheme is introduced, (this translates to “If Labour win the next General Election” because the Tories have promised that they will scrap the idea…ha ha) Your NID will be connected to your Nectar card to your Electricity bill, to your postcode, to your telephone number etc etc, and all of this will be available to any one of the entities that you are getting a service from, and ALL of this will be available to Nectar, since they are clearly trying to forge relationships with anyone who sells anything to anyone on a large scale.

Nectar will have information on every shopper – fine grained information that would make any marketer faint with extacy at the prospect of the super detailed profiles that could be built with the data.

Imagine it; you already get personalized postcards from supermarkets, printed with your name made of flowers; imagine this data being used to tell you about things that you are 100% certain to be interested in. Its a very compelling and seductive idea – from both ends – because it would be useful as a shopper to be informed of things that you might want to eat or read, just like TIVO tells you what you might want to see on TV. Oh yes, they WILL be joining Nectar, them and SKY also.

You would never miss a bargain, a new product or special offer, and you get points for buying these things that you know you want. That is pure seduction. That is a cause to give up your privacy.

Of course, all of this could be done anonymously, but then the benefit would be purely to the customer, and the essential demographic analysis bussiness model of Nectar would be destroyed.

Privacy will be taken very seriously when Nectar is everywhere, and there is very little privacy; in other words, when it becomes scarce. When that happens, people will pay for privacy.

There will be legions of people and services providing privacy, in the same way that there are professional dog walkers in the major cities of the world. You will pay someone to do your shopping for you, in their name though the goods will be going to you. These Dorian Greys will take on all the sin of your shopping, and heap it onto themselvs, leaving your record clean and lean. Your ID will show that you never buy anything, except (if you are careless) the services of one or two people, who might not even be real people, who will seem to have the buying power of 100 human economic units.

Dont worry, this does not mean that you will loose your Nectar points. The Dorian Greys will keep perfect accounts of what was spent on your behalf, anynmoysly, and your points will be redemed for you on whatever you desire. You will get it all, the anonymity AND the privacy.

I personally know people who already do this. They use a network of friends to collect packages for them, who dont mind if their address is used on forms, and who know what to do when an unexpected package arrives for that “JANE EYRE” woman whose mail always ends up at the house unexpectedly. These people use cash only of course, and when they need to buy something from Amazon, they have a friend who does that for them, including recieving the books of course.

Obviously this being the age of the internet, there will be organized identity swapping sites so that you can break the trail that follows you around. “NctarSwap.com” register it right now. There is a problem with this however, if you have a Nectar card and swap it for one that was used to collect points when someone was buying someting fradulently, you could be swept up when you tried to use it. Also, these cards will have so much information on them that is personal to you, it would be …unwise… to swap it with anyone at all, so scratch that last paragraph. Partially. You get the picture; identity swapping will be organized on a massive scale, by the same type of vigilante that creates sites like bugmenot. Demand will make these services appear.

Scarcity.
Demand.

“Never before have we been so contented”^*

[…]

From BLOGDIAL

That post was made on Saturday, the July 24th, 2004, at 7PM.

^*Never before have we been so contented, never before has life been so satisfying…

A referendum of bliss, a fabrication of gratification sustained by the benevolence of authority…

the inadequacies of the human personality are rapidly being overcome by the social processes of advancing technology. Component lowness, a sophisticated stimulation is the answer.

The humanity of authority is proudly contemporary.

Control through companionship, combined with economic advantages of the mating structure far surpasses any disadvantages in increased perversions. A final…an infinite translate in the mathematics of tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary.

Stimulating rhetoric. Absolute. The theater of noise is proof of our potential. The circulation of autotypes. The golden talisman underfoot is the phenomenon approaching, and, in the history of now, our ethos of design.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under NIR.