There is a saying that goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. But what if you’re paying for it – and you’re still the product?
Welcome to your next new car – previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier this month – in which you’ll be surrounded by new technology designed to “monetize” everything from your musical preferences (it knows which stations you like) to where you like to go (it keeps track of where and when) and what you like to eat.
Perhaps even what you look at as you drive.
The cameras so many new cars come with already will soon be pointed at you. You’ll be surrounded sensors, too – in the seats, in the dash – anywhere they can be put where data about you can be mined.
That data used to construct a pastiche of your inclinations, which will then be sold to a company interested in trying to sell you something based on that knowledge of your inclinations.
And the insurance mafia is interested as well. Have you been buckling up? Accelerating – or braking – “aggressively”? It’s no longer just between the two of you – you and your car.
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Your car is now a narc – one you get to pay to narc you out.
Some of you reading this may recall the 2002 Tom Cruise movie adaptation of sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Minority Report – which was written decades earlier (1956) and long before there was an Internet, email or a government-corporate cyborg intelligence in your dashboard.
In the movie, Cruise’s character is practically hag-ridden by holographic product peddlers, who personalize the peddling of their products to him (and everyone else) via data acquired much as it is already being acquired right now – via what you search online, the things you read and of course, the things you buy.
