Invitations and Becomings

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because
I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of
them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave
me my name!" Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Following up my previous post on personalisation as destiny, I read an interesting policy post by the Center for Democracy and Technology. The "behavioural advertising" they talk about is a slightly less sophisticated form of the behavioural personalisation built into Vignette Recommendations. Here's how they describe it:

"Contextual advertising, which is often used to generate ads
alongside search results, matches advertisements to the content of the
page that a consumer is currently viewing: a consumer who visits a
sports site may see advertisements for golf clubs or baseball tickets
on that site.

In contrast, behavioral advertising matches advertisements to a
consumer’s interests as determined over time. If a consumer visits
several different travel sites before viewing a news site, the consumer
might see a behaviorally-targeted travel advertisement displayed on the
news page, even though the news page contains no travel content. A
traditional behavioral ad network assembles profiles of individual
consumers by tracking users’ activities on publisher sites within their
network. ... While only a
small portion of online ads are currently targeted this way, behavioral
advertising is a growing segment of the online advertising industry."

They point out that these profiles are nominally stripped by the ad networks of any personally identifying information (PII). But the CDT is concerned that behavioural information is generally gathered on an opt-out basis, and that consumers of these sites are rarely well-informed of the
nature of the data being gathered or the way the companies intend to exploit it (which third-parties or government agencies might gain access to it). This is important, they say, because, there is a risk that this behavioural information can be pieced together with other data to determine the identity of the owner.

I agree that behavioural information is sensitive, but I don't think that's just because it can be used to triangulate back to some other "personally identifying information". After all, what could be more personally identifying than a data model that fairly accurately predicts what I'm likely to do next? After all, does the tax office or my doctor really know me better than my mother?

There's a great deal of value in the CDT report, and I don't mean to belittle it. But it has made me realise that the classical liberal conception of identity - best captured in John Proctor's speech at the start of this post - may actually aid, rather than defend against, the commodification of our lives.

Proctor's courage in defense of his name appears noble because he becomes a martyr for his legal identity. After all, it's his signature he will not relinquish, and the price he pays is his life. But this legal identity may actually be worth much more in death than it is in life. What use would it be to Proctor to refuse his signature, if he were kept alive; forced to behave as though he has repented his herecy? Or as Brecht might put it (from the perspective of power), "What is a man dead on his back, compared to one alive and on his knees?"

The point I am trying to make is that continuing to use a legal or other formal identity (e.g. health record/social security numbers) as the litmus test for the over-commodification of personal identity may leave us defending nothing but a sweet, nostalgic idea. Once our behavioural identity can be bought, is there still any point in defending our names? Haven't our souls have already been sold?