ANDREAS Bernard’s extensive and diligent history of profiling is one of repression, disappointed dreams and a toxic shift in human psychology.

Beginning with an exploration of criminal profiling from the 1770s and its attempts to predict behaviour on the basis of facial features, he moves on to efforts by psychoanalysts and criminologists to use a battery of personal characteristics to identify potential arsonists and rapists.

The book concludes by considering the transformation of the utopian ideas of the digital counterculture of 1990s California into a technology of total control.

Bernard traces the origin of a range of tools supporting this new form of profiling and, in a chapter on satellite positioning technologies, highlights paradoxical attitudes relating to GPS.

There was protracted legal wrangling about the human rights implications of tracking convicted offenders but users of mobile phones and fitness monitoring bracelets now allow hundreds of friends to assess their locations and physical movements 24/7.

Bernard goes on to explores the notion of the “quantified self”— the idea that we need machines to help us take stock of ourselves — and the growth of the self-tracking industry. This has led to us recording sleep, mood, food, exercise and sex and sharing the information with friends, strangers and corporations.

It is then used to sell us more carefully targeted products, challenge our insurance claims and, ultimately, control our behaviour.

Bernard considers the extent to which profiling systems are used in the service of a vast, digitised census, in which every aspect of our lives is recorded in the name of career development, access to services and connection to communities of interest.

The need for belonging is a key influence in these developments and it is evident, Bernard suggests, in our enthusiasm to pay for technologies that would have appalled Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984.

Occasionally, The Triumph of Profiling wanders off piste in a way that adds nothing to its core arguments. Bernard’s attempt to link profiling technologies to the popularity of the bushtucker trials in I’m a Celebrity is unsupported by evidence.

And his assertion that Nike employees paying for visible “swoosh” tattoos is an outcome of the link between profiling and performance is unconvincing — the adoption of brands as tattoos may be mediated by factors outside the realm of digital tracking.

Yet his book is a powerful and readable argument that we no longer resist the control technologies formerly imposed on us by external agencies. In fact, we are openly embracing them.
Corporations no longer need to unify the thinking of those they dominate. Instead, argues Bernard, our behaviour is controlled through tools we buy to reinforce our sense of self-determination and individuality.

Published by Polity Press, price £15.99.