Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #453762 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Targeting customers through their data trails
Companies, political parties, advertisers and individuals are harnessing the masses of data in our increasingly digitised world to know more about us than ever before. Businesses like Amazon and Google sift through our every click (and solicit our feedback) to find out more about us so they can customise what they sell us, both to keep us happy as customers and to increase their profits. Supermarkets use loyalty schemes to pinpoint their sales promotions to good prospects in increasingly elaborate ways. Political parties know who the floating voters are and what messages will make them vote for their policies. How do they do it, and what are the implications for our privacy? There are few technical details here, but this is a good introduction to the world of data mining.

Disappointing
This is well written journalism that concentrates on the numerati themselves. Nothing wrong with journalism per se (I was a journalist myself for some years), but there's a bigger story to be written about than this. I was hoping for a more insightful analysis of the techniques, implications and/or limitations of mathematical and statistical analysis being applied at massive scale on the world around us. But what the author delivered was a set of interesting anecdotes.