Technocreep (14 page)

Your friends may even have an impact on your personal credit worthiness. Start-up loan site Lenddo is open about the fact that they allow prospective borrowers to “use their social connections to build their creditworthiness and access local financial services.” This translates into a “Lenddo score from zero to 1,000,” which they say “measures character.” It is based on an undisclosed combination of “social data, information from your community, and data related to your Lenddo products.”

One thing is clear: you want to be careful who you hang out with online if you want a high Lenddo score. On its website Lenddo acknowledges that “You should be selective when adding members to your community. Members of your Trusted Connections should be people that you know and trust. Their Lenddo Scores are derived from their social data, payment behavior with Lenddo products; most importantly they impact your LenddoScore as their LenddoScores increase and decrease.”

If all your Facebook friends are deadbeats, you will be looking at a very high interest rate, or no loan at all. What if you try to stiff Lenddo? Let's just say they reserve the right to let your “Trusted Connections” on social media know all about it. And as your Lenddo score publicly plummets, you are dragging the scores of your friends down too.

Does social media shaming work? An employee at a bar in Reno, Nevada, got so angry when a customer ran out on a hundred-dollar bar tab that he snapped a photo of the guy and it was posted on the bar's Facebook page as a warning to other businesses that he was a “dine and dash artist.”

The scoundrel wound up being arrested for other charges, and he promises to pay the bar tab someday—once he is finished serving his time. The story has gone viral, bringing the bar attention from people who will probably never set foot in Reno.

What you post and who you hang out with on sites like Facebook may hurt your job prospects or get you rejected during school admissions. Six U.S. states have passed laws banning employers from demanding the social media passwords of employees or prospective employees. If you are hoping for admission to an Ivy League school or a new job, and you have posted naughty things on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Vine, you could of course just try to get rid of your online presence. But that is nearly impossible, say the experts. For one thing, you will live on in the postings of everyone you know. As Alan Katzman pointed out at
Business Insider
, “some (college applicants) have opted for a full social media lockdown or have simply changed the name on their Facebook profile. The risk of this approach is that colleges could rightly conclude that the lack of a social media presence means the applicant has something to hide.”
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How you appear on social media can even influence whether or not someone will buy you a free lunch. Webinars have emerged as the dominant way to “educate” people about the finer points of new technologies. Of course they are usually “sponsored” which means you get to learn a lot about some vendor's products. To get you to attend, they usually offer incentives, often a trinket like a flash drive or USB charger for your car.

IT industry firm Condusiv Technologies raised the bar in October 2013, offering to buy your office a pizza in return for listening to their online pitch. They even offered to “include gratuity for the delivery person so there is no cost to you.”

Since Condusiv wouldn't want to send pizzas to people who do not appreciate the subtleties of “I/O Optimization Techniques,” they included a disclaimer reserving the right to refuse a pizza to anyone. But how would they tell a CIO from a janitor, when both might have a company email address? “We use LinkedIn to audit job title reflecting IT responsibility,” they explained in their invitation email. If your profile says your skills include “Dinosaurs” or “Towels” or “Medical Marijuana” (real examples from a collection assembled by Mashable), there will be no pizza for you.
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So, before you solicit gag endorsements for Embroidery or Guinea Pigs or Dangerous Drugs (other real examples from that collection), you might want to think about who can see it. Information that you provide in one context, even in jest, can be used to form judgments about you in totally different and unanticipated situations.

Sometimes you do not even have to provide the information. It is accumulated automatically and shared without your consent or knowledge. When I first heard about Zoominfo, an online aggregator of information about people, I immediately went there and found myself. It showed my current professorial position, and even reminded me of some old projects that I had completely forgotten about. However, it also named me as a director of a Virginia-based Aerospace company and said that I taught at Bard College. Neither of these claims were true, so I claimed the profile in 2008 and corrected it.

I decided it would be fun to see what information they had back then on the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen J. Harper. I was astounded to see him listed with the title “Campaign Director.”

Campaign Director is a long way from Prime Minister of Canada. Zoominfo was using old information, and Harper had not yet “claimed” his profile, which you do by providing Zoominfo with a credit card that matches your profile name. They do not charge the card, at least for their basic service, but they do use it for identity confirmation. I mentioned Harper's profile in some Canadian government circles and soon his profile was claimed and updated.

Another under Mr. Harper's “Employment History” reveals how Zoominfo “thinks.” Some news reporter, or blogger, apparently wrote about “Stephen Harper, the somewhat reluctant leader of the Conservative” party and the site's “patented” technology dutifully used that as his official title. It gets even worse. I logged on once and found him listed as the “Odious Leader of the Conservative Party.”

You can actually use Zoominfo to play an interesting game of “find my doppelgänger.” Aside from the well-known Tom Keenan at Bard College, I now know that other Tom Keenans run a beverage ­company in Portland, a trucking company in Illinois, and a Foundation in Australia.

There is a Tom Keenan who teaches at an elite private school in New York City. Not only do we share a name, our email addresses are very similar, and so I know a disturbing amount about his private and professional life. I frequently get emails of the “dog ate my homework” variety from his students. I did finally have to call him when the Parents' Association at his school erroneously published my email as the contact for an upcoming “career day.” I had Park Avenue neurosurgeons and Wall Street tycoons mailing me their confidential resumes as potential guest speakers.

There are three basic steps to handling information: input, processing, and output. So far, we've looked at how some creepy information systems suck up information about us as their input and process it, often to our detriment. Yet the creepiest technologies may be the ones that output their data, directly into our bodies and our minds.

Walk into Kelly's Steak House in Las Vegas and you might find ­yourself instantly hungry for one of their signature dishes. Their secret? A frying pan full of delicious smelling, though probably inedible, onions, mushrooms, and spices simmering near the maitre d's podium. Realtors running open houses routinely toss bread in the oven to put you into that “let's buy a cozy new home” frame of mind. Shopping malls that are plagued with loitering teenagers have been known to chase them out with piped in classical music.

We usually think of these tactics as just clever business practices. However, science is being pressed into service in whole new ways, usually to get us to buy or at least crave something.

McCain, the dominant producer of all things potato in Canada, has infested a series of U.K. bus shelters with gigantic baked potatoes. According to a report in
Advertising Age
, “a hidden heating element warms the fiberglass 3-D potato and releases the aroma of oven-baked jacket potato throughout the bus shelter. The aroma was developed over three months in collaboration with a specialist scent lab.”
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Specialist scent lab? Actually, there is nothing new about that. In the 1970s, I was sent to interview an elegant executive at the posh Manhattan offices of Charles of the Ritz. They had just introduced a home accessory called “the Aromance Aroma Disc Player.” It accepted little round “scent discs” and, using heat and a fan, filled your home with aromas like “Romance,” “Fireplace,” and “Movie Time,” which smelled like buttered popcorn. Our chat was going along predictably until something provoked me to ask if they were working on any offbeat smells like, say, “Wet Dog.” A pert wiggle of Ms. Charles-of-the-Ritz's shoulders told me this was the logical end of the interview. This product only survives as a nostalgic posting on the Internet.
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As we now know, they were definitely on to something—a creepy technology to get inside our minds. Neuroscientists say that the sense of smell is extremely effective at evoking memories and emotion. Anyone who has packed up the effects of a deceased parent has probably experienced the power of smell. The effect even has a name, the “Proustian Phenomenon,” after the passage near the start of Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
where the protagonist dips a cookie into tea, and a rush of childhood memories spews forth for the next 3,000 pages.

We are often unaware how we are being manipulated by scents until we catch ourselves moving over to the more expensive products or walking like a zombie into a restaurant we had planned to pass by.

Scent manipulation even shows up in funeral homes, which use a special industrial-strength cinnamon spray for odor control around decomposing bodies. A blog post by Sabine Bevers also reveals other tricks. She claims that Apple doctors its product packaging to emit a standardized “new device” smell, regardless of the product that is packed inside. Holiday Inn reportedly alters the sensory environment for different kinds of function bookings—pumping rose scent into the air for weddings and leather for business meetings. Bevers exposes a Brooklyn, NY grocery story for piping bogus bread smells into the air, and suggests that casinos use different scents to attract their preferred clientele. She also claims that “Nike stores use a mixed flower scent to direct you towards the more expensive shoe designs.”
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Aromasys is one of the top companies in the “scent marketing” business, with offices in London, Hong Kong, Australia, and Las Vegas. Their website is discreet about their customer list, though they do trumpet one U.K. nightclub that was infused with “the scent of Watermint … filling the club with the tantalizing smell of Mojitos” and that “the scent of chocolate was also in the air at the candy-filled reception held afterwards at a Hollywood Studio.”
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The movie was
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
.

Australian researchers have discovered that at least one odor, freshly mown grass, can act directly on the hippocampus and the amygdyla to lower stress levels and improve memory. They have even founded a company, Neuro Aroma Laboratories, to market “Serenascent,” a kind of “eau de grass” product based on their research.

“Serenascent was first conceived during a relaxing visit to Yosemite National Park in the United States of America,” they write on their website. “The fresh calming aroma coming from the pine trees, sequoia trees and meadows inspired the inventors of Serenascent to study the relaxing effect of plants.”
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While this mixture of plant-derived hexanals, hexenols, and pinenes has not replaced Valium yet, there is certainly anecdotal evidence that people feel a lot calmer after gardening or even mowing the lawn. If, on the other hand, your goal is to stir things up, especially in the erotic dimension, there are a number of human pheromone sprays that claim they will have that effect.

The Disney Corporation is famous for its use of sensory manipulation to create just the right atmosphere at their theme parks. One is the “Smellitzer”—a device that shoots out carefully engineered scents the way a howitzer sprays bullets. Technically it is “a method for sequentially directing at least two different scents from a gaseous scent-emitting system,” according to a U.S. patent issued in 1986.
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You can smell the device in action at Disney parks, where the Smellitzer ensures that the Haunted Mansion is suitably dank and musty, and that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride evokes the smell of the sea. According to an article by Gabriel Oliver, the Smellitzer has a range of two hundred feet and there are fans to suck out the current smell when it is time for the next one to appear.
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Oliver notes that scent marketing also plays a role in other areas of the park. It helps to explain the sudden unexplained craving you get as you walk down Main Street, U.S.A., because “you're going to smell freshly baked cookies, whether there are cookies in the oven or not, thanks to the Smellitzer.”

The Barclays Center in Brooklyn has reportedly come up with a signature aroma that is piped in to stimulate the appetites of those heading to Brooklyn Nets games and other events there. According to a local blogger, their smell technology comes from a company called ScentAir, whose motto is “Add More Excitement to Your Crowd Experiences.”
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While many of companies that use scent marketing are coy about it, the operators of the arena used by the St. Louis Rams acknowledge that they use scent marketing in their facility. They set out to answer a question that nobody had asked before—“what would happen if you pumped a cotton candy scent into your stadium?” The answer, says the ScentAir website, is a boom in the sale of cotton candy. However, they also saw sales of other food and drink items increase, because, says ScentAir, “the cotton candy scent triggers a response to buy food and drinks in general.”