Last February, Ashley Seay was seventeen years old, a high-school junior studying cosmetology in a suburb of Chicago. Outgoing and empathetic, the middle child of five, she dispensed advice to her friends, made colorful photo collages, and coaxed stray animals into the house. She had a new boyfriend, and she told her sister Nicky, according to a post from Nicky on Facebook, that she’d never been happier.
Then, unexpectedly, Ashley died. Less than a year later, last Thursday, her father received a promotional mailer from OfficeMax addressed to “Mike Seay/Daughter Killed in Car Crash/Or Current Business.” His wife, Shannon, found the letter in a stack of mail. She has been so distraught over Ashley’s death that she has trouble leaving the house.
Even in a society grown numb to targeted marketing, the story of the letter has prompted outrage and confusion. It has raised new questions about what types of information data brokers gather and why, at a time when privacy concerns already saturate the news. Customers of Target learned two weeks ago that hackers had stolen the personal information of at least seventy million people, including their phone numbers and addresses, along with data from forty million credit cards and debit cards. At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last month, the head of an advocacy group testified that marketers now sell lists of rape victims and AIDS patients.
It’s hard to imagine how OfficeMax learned the details of Ashley’s death or how it might have used that knowledge to sell her father staples or copy paper. The company blamed an unnamed business that rented a mailing list containing Mike Seay’s name. “We were not seeking personal information and did not ask for it,” an OfficeMax spokesperson said, adding that the chain has “upgraded the filters” meant to flag unwelcome disclosures.
Mike Seay, after Ashley’s death, had an image of her face tattooed over his heart. He wants two things: an apology from the company’s C.E.O. (OfficeMax was acquired in November by Office Depot) and an explanation of how this happened. He has received neither. On Sunday night, Seay told me, an executive called to apologize. But it wasn’t the chief executive, and Shannon took the phone to argue about whether the mailing was the result of a “data error.” Finally, after pointing out that a human being most likely wrote the phrase that appeared on the letter, Shannon hung up on the executive.
Segmenting potential customers based on their traumas is the funhouse-mirror inversion of a popular retail strategy known as “life-stage marketing.” The idea is that during certain transitions—weddings, births, new homes—people will spend a lot of money, obviously, but will also be especially open to changing their habits. Crate & Barrel hosts engagement parties not only to persuade couples to register at its stores but to build new brand loyalties. Companies race to be the first to find these lucrative shoppers, which is how Target got in trouble several years ago for revealing that a teen-age girl was pregnant before she had told her father.
Life-stage marketing is geared to all those happy families who are alike; it forgets about the others, all unhappy in their own way. The strategy works when events unfold according to plan, but reality, as most people learn sooner or later, has a way of defying predictions. While Google and Facebook—which recently added video advertising—can use data gleaned from keyword searches to target ads with unnerving specificity, they also can be oblivious when patterns are disrupted. Months after an engagement ends, Facebook still plasters a home page with pitches from wedding-related vendors. Women who have experienced miscarriages describe the fresh grief they feel each time they’re sent another coupon for baby gear.
Emily Wilkins, a blogger, wrote about receiving a huge “Celebrate Baby” catalogue from Target after she miscarried, along with mailings from Gerber, American Baby magazine, and Similac. “None of them got the memo that I’m no longer pregnant,” she noted. Another writer wished aloud that Amazon.com would stop showing her deals for strollers and car seats, adding, “It kind of doesn’t help that corporate America is knocking on my door with daily reminders.” As many as fifteen per cent of confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage.
“I would never have expected this to turn so ugly,” Mike Seay told me. “But now I’m learning so much about companies and their data mining. How much of this information do they have? That’s what this is really about. If this happens to one more person, then I didn’t stand up and do what I should have done. Nobody needs to feel that kind of pain.” He is considering hiring a lawyer to compel OfficeMax to answer his questions.
There could be a legitimate reason for someone, somewhere, to record information about Ashley’s death; support groups might want to reach out to bereaved parents who could be helped by their services. But the fact that her tragedy ended up pasted on a generic flier for office supplies emphasizes how private moments of suffering, stripped of any protective barrier, have become scraps of data tossed on the wind. “It’s very detailed about how she died,” Mike Seay said. “The wording itself is malicious: ‘car crash.’ A person doesn’t talk like that. I would never look at a person and say, ‘Your daughter died in a car crash.’ That is so insensitive.”
In “You Are Not a Gadget,” Jaron Lanier writes, “The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.”
Lanier, a pioneering researcher of virtual reality, argues that it is a “philosophical mistake” to believe that computers can represent human thought or relationships. To a computer, Ashley Seay’s death is a final data point in her brief life. To her family, she remains present. To celebrate Christmas, they put up a small tree by her headstone and covered her grave with pine branches.
Photograph, top, by ShaneKato/Getty.
