April 15, 1990

AT THE risk of sounding like a curmudgeon before my time, I’ve decided it might as well be me that takes the first public potshot at a new product by Lotus Development Corp., released with much fanfare at last week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Called “Lotus MarketPlace,” it’s being billed as a “desktop information product” for Apple Computer’s Macintosh that allows “any business person to perform sophisticated sales prospecting and market analysis.”

It’s a series of CD-ROMs (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) containing a monster database of 7.5 million U.S. businesses and 80 million U.S. households.

The householder data — that’s you and me, m’dears — contains name, address, age, gender, marital status, household income, “lifestyle,” “purchase propensity” (your ability to consume at random) and the kind of dwelling you live in.

The technology is clever. When you buy the product for $695, you purchase the right to use only 5,000 names in the database. The software operates on the postage-meter principle, monitoring every record that’s exported to another software program or printer. When it hits the magic number, you call Lotus, credit card in hand, for a special password that lets you have 5,000 more names for $400.

MarketPlace engendered a fair bit of controversy at the Expo. The first thing I immediately hated about it is that it encourages junk mail.

As many people know already, in the direct mail biz, a great “hit” rate — that is, how many people respond to a mail marketing blitz — is 2 percent. So most of the time more than 98 percent of the paper used in a direct-mail campaign is worthless (not to mention unrecyclable) and goes into the garbage.

Then, of course, there are questions of privacy. It disturbs me that any schmoe with $695 can buy a list with not only my name in it, but a number of other salient details about my life, including personal habits.

And what if I sent my “do not solicit” letter to the Direct Marketing Association, requesting to be removed from all mailing lists, one day after the database was pressed onto those compact disks? Suddenly I’m stuck on somebody’s mailing list for all eternity, or at least the life of an optical disk. This doesn’t make me happy.

MarketPlace product manager Doug Borchard wasn’t surprised to hear my concerns. He even had a reply to the issue of tree ecology. Since the product lets users massage lists before they “purchase” them, Lotus hopes that direct mailers will find their “hit” rates go up as a result of using the product. (I want to see those statistics in a year.)

And Lotus, as well as data provider Equifax National Decision Systems (part of the Equifax credit bureau, where it gets its data), says it’s impossible to look up an individual’s name in MarketPlace. Bob Evatt of National Decision Systems says even if it was possible, data on income and shopping habits are not specific — such as, “shops at Sears and makes $35,000 a year.” The figures are run through statistical modeling software and slotted into general categories.

Evatt also says Equifax checks every name with the Direct Marketing Association before the database pressed into the Lotus disks. And if you wrote DMA a week too late, Lotus will send disk updates quarterly so you’ll be expunged on the next go-round.

Despite these efforts, I see problems ahead. As always, technology is a double-edged sword. In this particular instance, it’s wonderful that small and medium sized businesses finally have the kind of access to lists that Fortune 1000 companies do — Evatt calls it “the democratization of data” — and better yet, can use technology to access the kind of demographic information that helps them focus their marketing on the people who might truly be interested in what they’re selling.

But you know that some clever nerds will break that code in a couple of months and find a way to suck out the information on individuals. And it likely won’t take them long to “crack” the software on that postage-meter counter, either, giving immediate birth to a black market in old, expired disks.

I realize I risk being dismissed as a neo-Luddite, a technological ostrich, or maybe just some kind of hick for not embracing the fact that we are transiting to an information-based economy and that people need to make money off me, whether I like it or not.

Nonetheless, I think it’s vital to pay attention to every technology product or service with the potential of chipping away at our privacy or our right to be left alone, or that contributes to us befouling the planet more than it already is. I’m not suggesting an alternative. I don’t have one. I just think it’s important to call the question. Because once a powerful product like MarketPlace is out there, there’s no calling it back.