What does it mean that this book seems anachronistically cute now?"The Naked Consumer" was written in 1992; Nielsen ratings, consumer focus groups, census data and market research companies were the main methods of how Corporate America invaded our privacy. Since its' publication, website cookies alone have added more personal information about ourselves than could possibly be acquired through the previous methods mentioned. Most retail stores have club cards, social networking websites like Fac...

I read this book many years ago. It is about privacy and the collection of information. Since it was published in 1992, before the internet took off, it is hopelessly out of date, but parts of it still ring true. The best part is the author's 'Four Laws of Data Dynamics' governing personal data collected by marketers and advertisers.1. Data must seek and merge with complementary data.2. Data will always be used for purposes other than that for which it was originally intended.3. Data collected a...

Having just read “Dead Wake,” Erik Larson’s latest blockbuster, and having consumed each of his previous novels, I ran across his very first book, a nonfiction account of how companies spy on the consumer. I was curious as to how Larson would report on my least favorite social activity. He handled it with remarkable aplomb. Published in 1992, when Larson was a free-lancer living in Baltimore, it’s a book he claims to love, although apparently no one else did. It is not the booming hit his later

I love Erik Larsen and how he writes. I found this 1994 book of his about how personal data is bought and sold, an area I know well from my work. Larsen predicts many of the future habits of the internet, but he also shows us how much has changed. 20 years on this book got me thinking about how our concepts of privacy have changed in the age of the internet.

Not my favorite Larson, but it was also more of a deep dive into the inner workings of market researchers and what exactly they use at their disposal. Since I work in the market research field, some of it was actually kind of interesting to see what data is considered influential and how they retrieve this data.The part of the book that got a little tired on me was the screaming issue of privacy. Like people shouldn't be allowed to know where I work, where I live, or what cereal I buy. I underst...

Great starter book on the personal privacy issue - especially on the problems with the current U.S. census programs. However, the book was written almost 30 years ago now and Larson could not have foreseen the advent of social media, the computing power/ camera ability of cell phones, or the meteoric rise of the hacking communities.

Very interesting. Well written. Just not as much my thing. But still learned a lot. First book written by Erik Larson, and I want to read everything he has written. Two of his other works so far are amazing - Devil and the White City and Dead Wake. Looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

Interesting and unnerving. Published in the early 90s, this book demonstrates the erosion of our privacy and the targeted manipulation of our patterns. What do the US Census bureau, grocery stores, IRS, etc do with my data??

A privacy warning from 1992

So relevant today, such a must-read.

Written in 1992, the subtitle says it all... "How Our Private Lives Became Public Commodities." This book is some 20 years old, and yet the insights inside give one great pause about the proliferation of his/her personal information that's on so many computers and in the data banks of so many companies now... knowing it was written that long ago makes it all the scarier! After reading other books by Erik Larson I decided to go back and catch this older one that I missed. Larson researched compan...

Erik Larson's The Naked Consumer captures a moment where marketers learned to combine seemingly innocuous public information into powerful, almost intrusive, insight into our personal lives.Larson commits on the involuntary nature of much of this information gathering and wonders what we can do about it.Whether this information marketing is improving your life by tailoring products to you or is manipulation and intrusive is probably dependent on your worldview.But this is an interesting book tha...

Read with high hopes after reading his "The Devil in the White City." Looking for an in depth treatise on privacy. Disappointing in that it has all the problems of books written by journalists - repetitive, simple-minded, anecdotal story-telling in the first person sprinkled with set-up interviews of knowledgeable people. Very unsatisfying. Written in 1992, read in 2006, maybe it was informative when it was written and didn't age well.

I love Erik Larson. He's one of my favorite writers. I would have given this 4 stars if I hadn't read it when it was 20 yrs old, but I was only in 7th grade when this was published and I doubt 7th-grader me would have been interested in this. And now I will continue with my quest to read all of Larson's books.

I'm not sure why I didn't give this book five stars. Maybe because it hasn't aged as well as it could have. Like the other Larson books I've read it was well written and engaging. I definitely recommend it for anyone concerned about media influence in our lives, consumption/overconsumption and sustainability, and privacy.

Another follow up in my quest to make up for my mistake in thinking "Isaac's Storm" was Erik Larson's first book. This one has held up well in that Goodreads' general rating is 4 Stars and so is my personal one.The tricks and devil inspired techniques used by the data miners that Larson describes in large measure are forerunners of the more despicable and annoying ones used by today's marketers, both criminal and maybe not so. Certainly the issue of what 'privacy' is and how much we deserve is a...

From todays perspective, Larson’s complaints of intrusion by marketers and general loss of privacy go well beyond quaint. In 1992, when he wrote the book, the internet did not exist in any widespread way. He complains about direct mail companies knowing that his wife was going to give birth shortly, which is, admittedly creepy, but nothing compared to what was coming. He never could have imagined that not only would our privacy be invaded by corporations at every minute, but that we would gladly...