Some decades ago I had a personal involvement in the sort of profiling project that would eventually feed into hyperpersonalisation. My version wasn’t purely commercial, however; it was designed to track down a fraudster. The client was trying to deal with a situation where – thanks to the borderless markets of the EU – an individual might pop up in Paris one week and Stockholm the next, each time trying to sell Madrid airport (yes, really) to a different branch of the same bank. Our challenge was to piece together whatever we could about them.
Our database was pretty crude as such things go – fast, pervasive internet and large online repositories of personal data weren’t things we could rely on in 1997. But it was fully distributed, surviving a terrorist…
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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024