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Glossary

Profiling

Data and infrastructure

Profiling is the construction of a person's profile from the data they have left behind, in order to predict what they will do next.

In marketing it is what allows a message to reach specific audience segments instead of an entire mailing list; in machine learning (systems that learn from examples) it is the task on which the quality of your source data gets measured, because a profile is worth exactly what the data behind it is worth. It carries an explicit legal constraint: profiling belongs to whoever can state where each field came from and on what legal basis it is processed.

An example

A cosmetics company uses structured listening of online conversations to work out the demographic make-up and geography of its communities, then decides which provinces the distribution should concentrate on. Here profiling stays anonymous and serves a decision about the sales network, before it ever serves a personalised message.

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