ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the kinds of decisions, informed by predictive models that generate and reproduce the social, economic, and political disparities that are experienced as comparative and explicit disadvantage. It attempts to identify the kinds of bias, irrational and otherwise, that operate within and through the use of decision-support technology in a number of important markets. The segmentation and targeting of consumers requires reliable intelligence about the tastes, preferences, and resources that make differentiation worthwhile. Increasingly this intelligence is derived from the surveillance and capture of transaction generated information (TGI) from media and environments that gather this information routinely, automatically, and generally without the knowledge or consent of the targets of surveillance. Consumer identification, classification and segmentation take on an additional quality when a spatial dimension is added to the mix, as in the case of geodemographic clustering.
