Tesco profiling

The Guardian is getting worked up about Tesco's consumer profiling again. Nothing new in the report but it's worth reading. Tesco is criticised for putting a great effort into circumventing the data protection act. Whereas that might not be in the best interests of their customers, Tesco is a business and as Robert Kennedy said on Saturday, businesses are amoral. They exist purely to make money for their shareholders. So we should bare this in mind when we do business with them.

Peter Barnes has a nice essay on the negative externalties (such as invasions of privacy, which he doesn't explicitly mention) generated by business.

The biggest defect of modern capitalism can be expressed in a single word: externalities (or illth if you prefer John Ruskin’s prose). Either term refers to the harmful side-effects that accompany current economic activity: pollution, congestion, noise, cancer, stress, extreme inequality, loss of biologic and cultural diversity, and so on.

One way to evaluate the performance of an economic system is to look at the ratio of well-being to illth it produces. This is akin to the way engineers measure the efficiency of an engine: for every unit of energy an engine consumes, it performs some useful work and wastes some heat. The higher the ratio of work to wasted heat, the greater the engine’s efficiency.

It includes a razor sharp (excuse the pun) quote from an investment manager called Robert Monks: "The corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way a shark is a killing machine. There isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, as the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it is designed."

Or to put it another way if we put the fox in charge of the chickens, who exactly is responsible for the death of the chickens?