Introduction

At least for the last 30 years or so, and perhaps for longer, we have lived in a personal information economy (6, 1998). We have, of course, been ‘information societies’ since writing was invented in ancient Sumer: human societies of any complexity can hardly be organised on any basis other than information. But the centrality of personal profiling is a much more recent phenomenon.

Personal information is increasingly the basic fuel on which economic activity runs. Getting control and being able to make intensive use of vast databanks of profiles on individual consumers, citizens, clients and subjects gives an organisation a degree of resource-based power comparable to that possessed by the oilproducing countries until the 1980s. Companies offering geodemographic profiling data are the 21st-century equivalents of the great energy companies of the 20th, but subject to much more competition than were the old energy giants.

This phenomenon is not confined just to direct marketing or credit rating. Today, for example, huge global retail corporations make their investment decisions on strategy, products and the location of outlets based on the most finely grained analysis of their consumers’ incomes, wealth, preferences, mobility and behaviour. The ‘loyalty card’ phenomenon has little to do with fidelity, because those who take one card will almost certainly take others from rival chains: rather, such schemes provide very detailed profiles on the buying behaviour of named and closely tracked individuals. Financial services companies sustain their profitability only to the extent that they can successfully target their ever wider ranges of products to ever more tightly defined small niche markets of savers and borrowers. The ‘marketplace of one’ may be an unattainable goal, save perhaps for the very rich for whom service offerings have always been fully personalised. Yet the commercial world is investing huge sums in its pursuit.

The charitable world is no different: fundraising for donations and legacies today uses data mining and warehousing methods indistinguishable from those used by all other financial services (Farr, 2002) – for that is what fundraising now is. In the government sector, too, the detailed profiling of clients underpins all the major changes in public services (6 et al, forthcoming).