The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard
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Today, more than 20 years after the arrival of social media and the firm establishment of job-application guides, the profile is an unchallenged and omnipresent form of subjectivization. On the job market, networks such as LinkedIn or Xing, which have millions of members, have made it a structural necessity for professional self-representations to be created in the form of online profiles. In a milieu like the university, every academic homepage, every research proposal, and every project description now has to be accompanied by an impressive “researcher profile” or “applicant profile.” As discussed above, the creation and maintenance of personal profiles on social media have become indicators of sound mental health. The format thus appears in both professional and private spheres as a faithful and autonomously manageable representative of the self, and people can constantly be heard talking about their own profiles.
This success story, however, not only disguises the historical fact that the format was developed as a normalizing and disciplinary instrument. It also diverts attention away from the present reality that, in tandem with the triumph of self-made profiles, the format has become a more effective means of describing and controlling others than ever before. In digital culture, the novel effects of profiles in the formation of the subject are offset by the multifaceted tendency to treat individuals as the object of standardized and interconnected data acquisition. Concepts such as the “user profile,” “personality profile,” or “customer profile” involve not only the actively and voluntarily divulged data of the user but also information about the user that has been collected, largely without notice, by companies, authorities, and agencies. The latter practice – a technique from surveying and census-taking – is, of course, far older than the recent history of self-generated profiles.37
Over the past 15 years, a central stage for this method has been marketing. Before the establishment of social networks, the ability to address potential customers depended entirely on the crude and unilateral channels of mass media. Advertisements in newspapers, on the radio, or on television thus had the same form for all readers, listeners, or viewers, and the impact of a company's new slogan or campaign was tied to the hope that the creative genius of the advertising agency could capture the attention of the widest possible circle of consumers. Through the fragmentation of the media system in digital culture, in which every user is simultaneously a consumer and producer, the anonymous masses have transformed into a multitude of individually addressable people. Under these new technological conditions, “marketing” means defining smaller and smaller target groups and even, in the ideal case, addressing individual customers with customized information. In this communicative situation, the profile is the place where advertisers can gather and evaluate information about their addressees.
The relationship between businesses and targeted consumers resembles that between forensic psychology and criminals, and marketing specialists have themselves noticed this and even emphasized the point. Since 2003, for instance, the German business consultant Andreas Wenzlau has offered a service called KundenProfiling (“Customer Profiling”), which he derived from the somewhat older American concept of “consumer profiling.”38 The logo used on his website and on his self-published handbook is thus an enlarged fingerprint. In the preface to the latter work, Wenzlau claims that he compared “the structures of criminological profiling with today's marketing practices” and discovered “very interesting parallels.” “While wrestling with questions concerning customers, acquisition, and marketing,” he goes on, “I was struck by an idea: New methods and options would be needed to understand the actual motives of consumers. It would have to become possible to enter the customers’ minds!”39 The term “customer profiling,” however, is an explicit expression of what has become a fundamental business model in the digital age of search engines, social networks, and online services. As is well known, global firms such as Google and Facebook have built their empires on the promise, first formulated by Andrew Weinreich, that companies are able to tailor, with previously unthinkable flexibility, the form and frequency of their advertisements for individual users. In 2007, for instance, Google patented a controversial method that enabled the company to construct reliable “user profiles” from the behavior of computer game players. Along with a player's individual tactics, the amount of time he or she spends on a gaming platform supposedly provides insights into the user's consumer preferences and thus enables highly effective advertisements to be placed at specific points in time.40
Over the past 15 years, the fact that companies possess such profile-based knowledge has provoked specific questions concerning data protection. In a country such as Germany, which has complex legal provisions governing “informational self-determination,” the development of the profile format was greeted with critical commentary from early on. As early as the year 2000, in an article on the use of personality profiles for marketing purposes, the lawyer Petra Wittig formulated grave “legal objections” against this form of data processing, and she stressed her conviction that even the consent of customers would do nothing to change the problematic nature of such a practice. The individual right to self-determination loses its validity, according to Wittig, “when personal integrity is placed without restriction at the disposal of those interested in data.” The creation of “user profiles” in marketing would therefore have to be forbidden in principle on the basis of the fundamental right to “informational self-determination.”41 Despite this early criticism, however, the precise legal status of the format was slow to be defined. As Christoph Schnabel noted in his 2009 dissertation on data protection and the concept of the profile, “there has yet to be a single case of legislation in which the creation of a profile has been treated as unlawful.” As of 2009, according to Schnabel, the format of the user profile did not even qualify as a “legal concept”42 – a loophole that was not closed until recently. In May, 2018, the European Union's long-discussed “General Data Protection Regulation,” which attempts to strike a balance between free trade and legal stability, finally came into effect. This regulation, which unifies the previously heterogeneous legislation of the individual member states, provides the terms “profile” and “profiling” with their first legal definition. They consist of “any form of automated processing of personal data evaluating the personal aspects relating to a natural person, in particular to analyze or predict aspects concerning the data subject's performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences or interests, reliability or behaviour, location or movements.” Among the “principles of fair and transparent processing” of personal data, EU regulations now “require that the data subject be informed of the existence of the processing operation and its purposes.”43
The authors of this legislation were aware, however, that the knowledge in profiles is not simply being collected by companies but is also being produced by the individual users themselves. A preliminary remark thus states: “This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.” Such activity might include, for instance, “social networking.”44 Aside from the fact that this stipulation maintains the fragile boundary between “personal” and “professional” activity online, the permeability of which has engendered many ways of economizing private life in digital culture, this passage does much to underscore the ambivalence of the current concept of the profile. For data protectionists, the superimposed “profile” is never fully congruent with the core of an individual's legally protected “personality.” Profiling is regarded as an external act of attribution, a fact that led Schnabel in 2009 to the conviction that, “as regards profiles, the self-determination of consumers is, from an economic perspective,