I Feel So Cheap

Black Friday is just a couple of days away and after that comes what I think is the most ridiculous of ideas - Cyber Monday. It is not that I don't like the concept of many retailers getting together to offer deals through their websites as a way to reel in the people who decided to skip Black Friday - what annoys me is when people act as though Cyber Monday is a real thing and not something which was invented about 3 years ago by some advertising executive. I understand that a big part of working in television is doing what advertisers tell you to do but there is a way to do it without insulting our intelligence quite so blatantly. Anyway, before many people decide to indulge in those online savings first they need to find the items they want to buy. In an age where there are hundreds of thousands of random, tiny websites selling knickknacks it can be kind of hard to stand out in a Google search. Ironically what many stores have figured out as the best way to get their products out there is still the old-fashioned system of mailing out catalogs. If your mailbox looks anything like mine has for the past week than you have probably been over-run with catalogs, many from stores you have never heard of before, let alone shopped at. Now, I think we are all adult enough to know how this happened - some store you actually bought something from once upon a time got an offer from a smaller retailer about buying their client list and they sold you out. Hey, it was just business. What I think I was unprepared for was finding out just how little worth my information actually has.

The website Gawker recently uncovered documents from a pending lawsuit between the State of New Jersey and a company which has been accused of shady business practices. In that lawsuit it was revealed that this company bought their client list, some 400,000 names, from another equally shady company which brands itself as a "data collection agency". So far nothing about this story seems that interesting because, as I previously said, this is how I generally assumed shady companies operated. They certainly didn't get their clients through their wonderful customer service and probably can't count on repeat business to stay afloat. The amazing part of the story was finding out that the 400,000 names on that list - which also included phone numbers, email addresses and browsing history on a car-buying website - sold for just $2,500. That works out to be roughly .16 cents a file. Didn't you think that number would be much higher? Personally I was expecting at least a $1 per name because it had to take a little effort just to input those names into a database and data entry temps are expensive. At that low price there is no telling who could be buying that kind of list or what they could be using it for. At least it explains why these tiny companies are only too happy to print up and mail you a catalog just in the hope you will find something you like - even if the printing company charges them .55 per mailing all you have to do is buy one item and they have easily covered their costs. It would be a great business model if it didn't make my skin crawl.

Perhaps the reason this issue is bothering me so much is that earlier this week I started to sign up for a "deal of the day" website. I had previously seen a few of the items they had offered and was impressed with the prices they claimed they could get me. Therefore I was willing to sell out the junk email folder on my throw-away email address that I keep for just such occasions. Everything was going fine until I got to the page when they asked for a credit card number, which they never told me was going to be required. I can deal with that kind of bait-and-switch if the site feels secure but while there are plenty of websites I am willing to trust with something like that for some reason this particular one gave me the creeps. I decided not to fill out the rest of the form and closed the window, expecting that to be the end of it. Unfortunately one of the boxes I had filled out was the one for my cellphone. Considering I never hit submit I thought I would be in the clear but apparently this site recorded my information even without signing up for the service. Since that afternoon my phone has been ringing twice a day as these people call me to ask why I didn't want to join their service (and seem genuinely surprised when I get angry that they are calling me on a number I don't think they should have in the first place). It really feels like a violation of trust. At least I can hang my hat on the fact my internet 'Spidey sense' is working just fine because of these guys are calling my phone twice a day I can only imagine what they would have done with my credit card number.

I will admit that as an SEO nerd it is kind of interesting to see that for all the times we have been told our personal information is sacred and valuable (users get up in arms every time Facebook announces a change to their privacy policy), at the end of the day to these companies it is just another string to add to the net they throw out hoping to catch a few extra sales. I guess in some ways it should be comforting to know that my email is so invaluable because it means I am probably not worth targeting, the way same way many people decide picking up a penny is not worth the effort of bending over. It is sort of a similar argument to the one for the recent NSA spying scandal - you know damn well the government wasn't listening in on your calls because even they know you have nothing important to say. Still, I can't help but wonder if this story should remind us all the internet is really just a big scam. I mean, how can companies like Facebook and Twitter be valued in the billions of dollars when the personal contact information of the average person on those sites (which should be gold to advertisers) is only worth three nickles and a penny? Adding to that, a recent Time magazine came up with a formula to determine the value of Twitter feeds and while some celebrities feeds are worth a few thousand dollars, surprise, many of your average Twitter pages were worthless. If I had stock I would seriously consider getting out of the tech market and putting it all in a company which prints catalogs. It certainly doesn't seem like those will be going away anytime soon.