Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

Abstract

In Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, Josh Lauer has written a very timely book. Recent mass hacking of consumer data from major retailers and repeated leaks of millions of files from Equifax, as well as more recent— and sinister—revelations of stealth data harvesting by Facebook and other tech companies, has made it very clear that individual consumer identities are valuable raw material for the data broker industry. Yet we can neither control what goes in, nor how and by whom it is used. In what Lauer calls a modern version of a Faustian bargain, we submit to constant surveillance and acquiesce to giving up personal information in exchange for accessing various, often ‘‘free’’ content, memberships, and services. Lauer’s focus is on how this informationalindustrial complex came to be, from its inception to the present. The book is a tour de force: it spans close to two centuries of detailed history, with the earliest references dating back to the 1830s. It turns the tables on the very companies that managed to transform disparate information about individuals into a marketable commodity by selling it first to lenders, for the purpose of evaluating borrowers, and then to retailers, for the purpose of segmenting consumer markets and identifying desirable high spenders. Lauer wants to set the record straight where it has been pretty muddled: despite commonly held beliefs about the role of technology, the pervasive consumer surveillance and financial identity of today are not a result of the post-1960s rise in computer algorithms and database storage capacities. In fact, they are not twentieth-century inventions at all. As Lauer persuasively and painstakingly demonstrates, they have deep roots and are largely coterminous with the development of consumer credit, itself the product of the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. Drawing on rich historical accounts, Lauer reveals that the first organizations devoted to consumer reporting were founded in New York in 1870; by 1890, they spread to many cities across the nation and all the way to California. The capacity of these early organizations with respect to consumer surveillance varied greatly: some merely produced basic blacklists of borrowers who defaulted on their obligations, while others dabbled in much more sophisticated rating systems or published annual reference books listing tens of thousands of individuals (with their addresses, occupations, and candid assessments of their reliability as borrowers). But it is these nineteenth-century attempts to collect and commodify information about individuals that laid the groundwork for the pervasive national consumer surveillance infrastructure of today. This early consumer surveillance was as sophisticated in nature as it was expansive, and it should not be written off as primitive or limited in scale. Already before the Second World War, Lauer reports that the financial lives of millions of Americans were effectively traced, and this information was no longer local but could follow individuals as they moved across the nation. What is particularly surprising is that the scale and sophistication of this rapidly developing surveillance capacity did not just rival but, according to Lauer, dwarfed that of the nation-state. The book provides evidence that local police departments and government agencies often 186 Reviews