Modern age Horoscope: Data Mining

Everybody is curious to know to what is in store for them in future and surprised to see some strangers know our past. But it is not always so, sometimes it makes us nervous and feel insecure too. Some people consider this age old fortune telling and horoscope to be a crap. But science has made significant progress in this field too and this has helped many industries especially the marketing segment. Today with such advanced statistic and number crunching formulas, Petabyte databases, sophisticated information retrieval techniques, highly co-ordinated distributed systems, one can easily deduce what your past was and what your future most likely would be. This is very important for vendors to concentrate their ad campaign on potential buyers like a directional antenna, instead of being an omnidirectional. You can see this being implemented in modern search engine results, ads flashed in web pages you visit, ad mail in your mail box, suggestion provided by eCommerce sites, etc. I hope soon matrimonial and dating sites would adopt this and help saving many marriages by bringing close most compatible souls. All are customized for you in lieu of making you to feel a special person based on the data you shared about your past.

It was rightly termed as Modern Age – Age of information. If we have or gather sufficient raw data, we can convert them into potential information using above mentioned scientific tools and expand our presence in the market. To get this raw data and that too voluntarily from you, so that you don’t sue them for privacy infringement, the vendors try to bribe you with special discounts. This often takes place in case of retail stores; where they give you a special card using which you can get certain discount on special items they sell. You fall for it, use it every time you purchase items to get that minimal discount and this sucks or entices you into vicious cycle of purchase and re-purchase. In this way the vendor can collect data about your past purchase trend and can market items you might need in future which he identified using the data mining tools. Thus they save money in unnecessary ad campaign and also retain their customer base. Retaining customer base is a crucial factor as it provides the vendor ‘word of mouth’ marketing free of cost. Whatever be the advancement done by science in the field of media, gossiping and reference have their place sealed forever.

It is good to feel special, but not always. I came across this funny incident at yahoo about how Target retailer was able to deduce that one of their customers, a high school teen was pregnant before her dad knew about it. They had sent some special discount mails to her about items needed for next stage in pregnancy after analyzing her past purchases. This had enraged her father who called them and demanded an apology. Later on when the truth came to light, he had called them back and apologized. The social networks too have business operations on their user information, since nothing comes for free in this world of capitalism. It would be great if vendors do not exploit their customer information, privacy in the name of marketing and governments direct them in their usage. Responsibility lies on customer/user too, and they should be careful about what information they share and how they share it. So let’s acknowledge this age’s horoscope power – range of its reach and be wary of it.