Technocreep (15 page)

Scent marketers know that environmental aromatherapy can sneak into our consciousness, unearth treasured memories, and unleash retail spending, all at the subconscious level. Most consumers are blissfully unaware of this whole aspect of store design, and you almost never see warning signs posted about scent marketing. Who knows where else merchants, museums, and perhaps even governments are using scent to get directly to your deepest, most intimate feelings? Take a good whiff the next time you are standing in line at the post office or motor vehicles office. Is that a tree outside? Or perhaps … Serenascent?

City University London professor Adrian Cheok feels that the Internet, as we currently know it, suffers from sensory deprivation. He is working on devices to transmit a person's body odor and body temperature, as well as sending tastes and smells electronically.

He plans to use coils in the back to the mouth to magnetically stimulate the “region of your brain that makes you perceive smells and tastes.”
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According to the report in
Motherboard
, Cheok is “working with the fourth best restaurant in the world (Mugaritz, in San Sebastián, Spain) to make a device people can use to smell the menu through their phones.”

Our other senses are also subject to manipulation, including the kinesthetic one that tells us which direction to walk for the lingonberry jam or the futons that are on sale. IKEA stores exhibit an uncanny awareness of human retail psychology. Long aisles take you past every possible piece of furniture, interspersed with handy gadgets you did not know you wanted. It is all specifically designed to keep you on the premises and shopping for as long as possible.

In a strange trance, many shoppers appear to completely surrender their free will when they enter the Swedish retailer's realm. Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, has been quoted as saying that “the trick is that because the lay-out is so confusing you know you won't be able to go back and get it later, so you pop it in your trolley as you go past.”
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It is true that IKEA stores now have shortcuts. Those are, according to Penn, much more about fire code regulations than enhancing shopper convenience.

Our ears are not neglected when it comes to sense advertising. Blogger Bevers notes that McDonald's works “a sound that you could describe as something in between a deep fat fryer and a car heating system” into radio ads that run around lunchtime. The restaurant chain is also a great example of the use of instantly recognizable “sound logos” such as their five-note “I'm Lovin' It” jingle. Audio signatures can stretch much longer than five notes. United Airlines leaves its passengers humming “Rhapsody in Blue” and even pumps an “otherworldly” version of it into the tunnel connecting terminals at O'Hare airport.
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Your smartphones and computer almost certainly pay a distinctive sonic tribute to their maker every time they start up.

Companies are even trying to brand certain tastes as being exclusively theirs. A guide to using taste in marketing campaigns notes that “Umpqua Bank used to buy a few dozen cases of honey bottles from a local honey farm each summer, and put its own label on the bottles as part of their bee-themed Summer Swarm promotion.”
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In
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
, Michael Moss describes how what he calls “the creators of crave” engineer their products to exploit human psychobiology. Writing on a
New York Times
blog, Moss explains how Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Taco is “a marriage made in processed-food heaven.”

“It has dynamic contrast,” he says, as well as great mouthfeel and a lingering smell that stimulates food memories and cravings. “But yet,” he says, “this is the strangest one of all, it's forgettable. None of the many flavors of Doritos Locos Tacos are strong enough to trip a signal called ‘Sensory Specific Satiety,” that will cause you to feel like you've had enough. That's the point. They are designed to make you want more.”
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Indeed, Arch West, “the Frito-Lay marketing executive credited with inventing Doritos,” was buried with the wildly popular snack food that he created.
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Mr. West made it to the age of 97 and died of natural causes. Will you be so lucky?

Would you want to know the exact date and time of your death? It is a thought-provoking question with disturbing implications. A number of death calculators are available online, each providing a disturbingly precise date for your demise. Some even show you your future tombstone. One of my favorites,
www.deathtimer.com
, uses age, gender, geographic location, body mass index, and smoking/drinking habits to form an educated guess.

I had to speculate a bit about the details of a certain well-known former intelligence contractor, but the result did have a creepy ring to it, particularly because this site claims to base its predictions on “life expectancy statistics from the CIA, United Nations, and other sources.” Edward Snowden's predicted date of demise is July 12, 2060, and his epitaph reads “Russian roulette isn't as fun as it appears.”

While Internet death calculators all come with “for novelty use only” disclaimers, there are an increasing number of tests that really can provide actual scientific information about your probable life-span. Tests indicating certain BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic mutations have led actress Angelina Jolie and many other women to undergo preventative double mastectomies to avoid potential breast cancer. Cholesterol and PSA tests, and what you do about the results, can potentially affect your longevity. Genetic screening tests can also help you plan a family, and possibly even help you engineer your children through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. These tests can raise life-altering and disturbing ethical questions. You may not want to open your test results when you get them, and you certainly do not want to share them too widely.

The advent of HIV testing in the mid-1980s brought the privacy aspects of medical testing squarely into the public's consciousness. As the seriousness of the disease and its routes of transmission were discovered, there were calls for the mandatory testing and ­disclosure of results to protect others. There have been a number of high-profile court cases where someone who is HIV-positive has knowingly infected someone without providing proper disclosure.

Two Canadian men, Stephen Boone and Noel Bowland, were each sentenced to jail terms in 2013 for not disclosing their HIV status to partners. Boone was also charged with administering a noxious substance—his own semen.
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Public health authorities want people to be tested for HIV status, and the medical nature of that disease has changed from an almost certain death sentence to one that is more manageable. Most civilized societies follow the World Health Organization guidelines for HIV testing. These procedures require that the testing be done only with informed consent, that counseling be made available, and that the test results be kept confidential. In some parts of the world, however, this standard is ignored.

The Guangxi Zhang autonomous region in the south of China now requires real name registration for HIV testing, in the interest of controlling the region's HIV rate, which is one of the highest in the country. The legislation, which took effect July 1, 2013, also requires those who test positive to warn their spouses or partners.
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Test results would still remain confidential, though how much people can rely on such a guarantee remains to be seen.

In Canada, the policy director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union has expressed concern about that province's “Seek and Treat” campaign, which seeks to prevent and treat HIV infections. Calling it “a perfect storm of privacy concerns in relation to HIV testing,” Michael Vonn says that there is now a push to make HIV testing routine, and to erode the privacy associated with testing. He notes that in Vancouver, HIV test results were once only delivered in person. Now, negative results can be obtained over the phone, which Vonn notes “is tantamount to giving all test results over the phone.” He also cites the province's “newly instituted data-sharing systems providing broad access to personal health information along with legal reforms that allow for that broad access.”
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With undoubtedly good intentions, the Huntington Society of Canada ran televised public service announcements in 2013 suggesting that the simple act of being tested for Huntington's disease might open you up to discrimination in Canada.
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The commercial's dramatic statement “being tested puts you at-risk” was actually somewhat misleading. Having the test itself is not the problem. It is how the results are handled that requires some careful consideration, both on an individual and societal basis.

The Huntington Society explains that Canada is the only G8 country that does not have legislation banning genetic discrimination. The group is spearheading a coalition to push for legislation forbidding discrimination based on genetics in Canada.

Current Canadian law provides a few after-the-fact remedies for people who are discriminated against for genetic reasons, but certainly not the same level of protection as in the U.S., the U.K., and most countries in the European Union.

The U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 prohibits genetic discrimination in employment and health insurance, although life and disability insurers are still generally allowed to base their decisions on whatever genetic information they can get their hands on.

In a 2012 report, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada ­surveyed the global situation on the use of genetic information by insurers. They found that, in the U.K., “the Association of British Insurers and the Government have agreed on a voluntary moratorium, recently extended to 2017, on the use of predictive genetic test results for life insurance policies under £500,000 or critical illness policies under £300,000.” In Germany, “insurers may only request genetic test results for life insurance policies that pay out more than €300,000 or for disability policies that pay more than €30,000 annually.”
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These results were noted in a study by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada which concluded that “the issue is far from settled in Europe.”

Huntington's disease is a particularly fascinating kind of genetic lottery because if one of your parents has the disease, you have a 50/50 chance of inheriting it.
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There is currently no cure and people who have it ultimately die from complications like pneumonia and heart disease.

Before genetic testing, children at risk for the disease lived under the shadow of getting it later in life. Now that it is possible to test for this abnormality, even
in utero
, new ethical problems present themselves. Is abortion of a fetus that is likely to be affected ethical? Given that there is no cure, or even any kind of really effective treatment, at what age should a person be tested? What good will it do an eight-year-old to know that the future holds a currently incurable disease?

The Huntington's test can make predictions with virtual certainty because the disease has autosomal dominant inheritance which is well understood. If you have more than 41 copies of a certain section of DNA on chromosome 4, you will almost certainly get the disease.
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Having 35 or fewer copies is not usually associated with the disease, and those with 36-40 copies have what is called “incomplete penetrance” with increased risk of having or passing on the disease.

While the Huntington's test can usually give a definitive answer, many other genetic tests are predictive, providing an indication that a person is at higher risk for a specific condition. We are told with some regularity that scientists have found a gene for alcoholism. Usually these results are less than convincing, especially since they typically deal with alcoholic mice or rats.
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Also, it's clear that someone who never touches a drink will not become an alcoholic, though they might express their addictive tendencies in other ways.

Since everyone has to die of something, many people find the idea of being told what it might be unnerving and unnecessary. Of course, the counterargument is that you might be able to make more informed lifestyle or treatment choices with better information. Knowing your genetic heritage might also be a factor in deciding whether or not to have children, and even a consideration in your choice of partner.

The Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Zaritsky has made a documentary called
Do You Really Want to Know
? about the ethical side of genetic testing. He notes that there is a history of Alzheimer's disease in his family, but that “in my case I've resisted being tested because I don't think my life will be improved any by the knowledge.”
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As Zaritsky explores in his film, once you have a test and choose to view your results, you can never turn back the clock. He does find that some people have made good use of their positive Huntington's test results. It has helped them plan their lives, and in one case, a couple where one spouse had the gene was able to make use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to select healthy embryos, sparing them the heartbreak of having children with the disease.

However, as the universe of possible genetic tests expands, we might soon be bombarded with television commercials suggesting we are somehow derelict in our duty, to ourselves and our families, if we do not probe our genetics and take action on it.

Speaking at the 2013 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Brian McNaughton, founding scientist of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company
23andMe
, frankly assessed the state of our knowledge of the human genome, saying that “Almost everything in the human genome is a variant of unknown significance.” This does not stop his company from offering Internet-accessible $99 genetic reports to anyone willing to pay. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did put a crimp in their business model. On November 22, 2013, they ordered the company to cease providing health-related information to customers. The firm will still run your test, and provide raw genetic data, which you can then take to other sites (such as
OpenSNP.org
) for interpretation. It is certainly not as convenient as the genetic risk reports that 23andme used to provide.