Consumers and the general public are surveyed on a number of levels, the most obvious being, cameras. Now aside from that there are more complex ways we are surveyed.

Supermarket consumer profiling – although we are not personally logged in a supermarket date base, (unless we have a club card) our purchasing habits are recorded and this data is then used to influence the layout of the stock on the shop floor to encourage shoppers into purchasing items., television advertisements are also created as a result of common occurrences in our receipt data.

Online data – the information we store online through social networking sites is  monitored and used to “improve its services” there are also more devious uses for our data. Various online market stores record our search history and create personalised pages with products that relate to what we’ve searched for in the past.

Email – Our email content is monitored and advertisements relating to key words within our messages to people often appear within the google mail service.

Western culture Ideology – Because we live and abide by a set of cultural beliefs and values we share a significant amount of that cultures ideology towards capitalism and consumerism. We are therefore profiled to a certain extent by large corporations and advertisers who can create links between our buying habits. They are able to survey us by sharing data with company’s who perhaps offer a similar service or target a similar age group. So for instance a magazine aimed at young male adults would advertise a high caffeine soft drink or sporting equipment, these links are not made by accident they are heavily considered and are designed to make the advertisers alot of money.