Two Sides to Every Profile
By Dale Dougherty
What kind of person visits your Web site? What products or services are they interested in? To answer those questions, you have to know your users. You can learn a lot by developing a profile, establishing a set of characteristics that describe your users and what they do or think. This profile can be used to help a company understand how to target customers and possibly predict patterns of behavior. A business might want to distinguish between the characteristics of those who make purchases on the site and those who don't. A marketer might look at demographic data including age, sex, income, geographic location, and other factors. Yet the best way to get this information is to ask the user to create his or her own profile.
But what are you really going to do with this data?
Criminal investigators use profiling to identify patterns of behavior that might lead to potential suspects. In a New York Times article titled "The Trouble with Looking for Signs of Trouble," Timothy Egan writes in the aftermath of the Littleton, CO shootings that one organization released a list of characteristics of young people prone to violence. The telltale signs included mood swings, use of drugs or alcohol, and frequent cursing. Egan writes: "The profile could fit most teenagers on a bad day, and some on a good day." In a few towns, kids wearing trench coats have been detained by police. Egan observes that profiling is "based on two very modern ideas that are often at war with each other." One is that social science can help us identify classes of people who might pose a threat to society.
