When I opened my first credit card, it got information from that; when I rented an apartment in New York City, it got information from that; when I bought a cheap car and drove across the country, it got information from that; when I got a speeding ticket, it got that; and when I secured a mortgage and bought my first house in Seattle, it got that.
Two decades after its creation, my LexID and its equivalents in the marketing world have connected tens of thousands of data points to me. They reveal that I stay up late and that I like to bicycle and that my grandparents are all dead and that I’ve underperformed my earning potential and that I’m not very active on social media and that I now have a wife and kids, who, if they don’t already have LexIDs, soon will.
Persistent identifiers let algorithms map in milliseconds a network of people I’ve met, lived near or interacted with online or off, and they show the trajectory of my life — up, down and sideways. They help health systems assess my living conditions, impacting what kind of care I get from my doctor. They affect how much I pay for car insurance. They help determine what kind of credit cards I have. They influence what ads I see and how long I wait on hold when I call a customer-service line. They allow computers inside police departments, intelligence agencies, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, political parties and marketing firms to understand personal behavior and, increasingly, as artificial intelligence and machine learning expand into every corner of society, to predict and exploit it.
This has been going on for longer than we realize. Asher’s first data start-up, Database Technologies, created a system that Florida authorities used to purge tens of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, many of them Black, from the state’s 2000 election rolls, helping put George W. Bush over the top in his effort to take the White House. He had already left the company by that point and started his next, Seisint, which worked with the Bush administration to build Matrix, a controversial post-Sept. 11 surveillance program. The program died in 2005, but the technology lived on in evolving forms inside the C.I.A. and other federal and state agencies. As I dug deeper, I learned that divisions of the information giants LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and TransUnion descended from data businesses Asher founded. The work of their clients — police departments, government agencies, much of corporate America — is propelled by his legacy.
Remembered by industry insiders as the “father of data fusion,” Asher reigned over a vast shift in privacy norms. He shifted them himself, scooping up data sets no one else had wanted, monetizing information no one had ever thought valuable, collecting details others had thought too intimate, testing boundaries that more established companies — with their brand names and boards and reputational risks and publicly traded stocks — had yet to ever dare test.