DoubleClick, Cookies, Segregation. (Score 1)

Suppose a major department store started a new policy: Adjusting their stock, prices, and interest rates based upon things like your zip code, income, and marital status, as well as an examination of whether you have visited any of their competitors?

Sounds bizarre, but that's exactly the "vision" promoted by the various profiling outfits that are busy mining data. It seems like a safe assumption that an online catalog viewed by an affluent businessman in a "proper" suburb will look quite different from that same catalog when viewed by a low-income user of a public terminal in a library.

The Internet (and other forms of electronic communication) has been perhaps the greatest catalyst for change in human society since the invention of writing.

If some people get their way, the Internet will become the perfect tool for segregation - and since it will be invisible (how will you know what your neighbor's version of that catalog looks like?) there will be few ways to fight it.