The nanny state rules again, right?
When kids go to Neopets and have to buy these things, they have to first earn Neopoints. The way they do that is by filling out marketing surveys. These surveys contain questions that I think you'd expect. A couple of years ago I filled out one about whether or not I liked breakfast cereals. It asked me, “Do you eat breakfast? How often do you eat breakfast? What time do you eat breakfast? Do you recognize this particular brand?”
But these surveys also ask questions that I think will surprise you. The one I filled out asked me what my parents did for a living. “Does Mom work outside of the home? What kind of car do your parents drive? How much money do you think your parents earn a year? Here are some brackets.”
Then they said, “We really want to know more about you. This is empowering. You can tell us so much about yourself and we'll be able to make this site even better to suit you better. Why don't you look at this list of fifty things and click on the things that really turn you on?” The list again included things that you would expect, like Barbies, video games, and reading. It also included things I don't think you're going to expect. On the list was beer, alcohol, cigarettes, and cigars.
These kids are nine and they are playing. They are not disclosing information for commercial purposes. Yet the kind of legislation that we have in place lets companies set up these kinds of environments and, through a very weak consent mechanism, capture that information and reconfigure it as a commercial commodity.
Social networking sites like Facebook, for example, work in much the same way. It's particularly popular right now with Canadians in their twenties and early thirties. These kinds of sites encourage people to post all sorts of information about their personal lives. You put your pictures up, you have your list of friends, and you fill out personal profiles. The profiles ask you to disclose things like your sexual orientation, your political views, and your religious views.
The company takes all this information and then also records all of the messages, all of the chat you have with your friends, all the searches you make, and all of the parties you set up. Then it takes the additional step of matching all that information about you with information also about you from other sources, like newspapers, blogs, instant messaging. The idea is to take it, slice it and dice it, and then sell you back to advertisers.
When people are on the site, they think they're sharing photos with their friends. My 20-year-old grad students, for example, spend a lot of time hanging out on Facebook and they throw up all of their pictures from their different parties, complain about how bad their classes are, gossip about their professors, but that information is encaptured as a commodity.
In fact, Facebook is one of a growing number of companies that now in their agreement say you've given us, just by using our service, a non-exclusive license. We now own that stuff and we can do what we want with it. We can give it away. We can post it in other places. In effect, what they're doing is they're taking the intimate details of these Canadians' private lives and turning them into the company's intellectual property.