Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted (opens in new tab)

Before moving away from our previous neighbourhood (new high density suburb), we were seeing an increase in door-to-door 'selling' generally, whether it's charity or political or religious or telco.

We figured it was the higher density of newer neighbourhoods that was driving the boom, although this kind of data tech is obviously making it a better proposition too.

It's probably a good time to be a "No Soliciting" sign manufacturer. I wonder what other defensive 'tech' you could deploy to avoid this stuff entirely.

The initial part of the article seems to imply this would be used by a large group of people, but then later clarifies it's for a person or two at the church, meaning it's essentially selling marketing info.

Is this different than how churches already find my name to send me targeted mailers or just a specialized version of an existing business?

> Jericho marches are an idea taken from the Old Testament

Perhaps ignoring the part where the Israelites murdered every man, woman and child in the city. These folks never got past Sunday school.

Having worked in technology for direct sales (door knocking) for 20 years, this is not surprising. There are already many platforms out there like Canvass, SalesRabbit, and Spotio. like anything else, these become more valuable with the data you can feed into them, and the network effects of growing your usage. This is also pretty common in the infrastructure that supports political canvassing.

I don't doubt that some use this, but getting most Christians past FaceBook would be something of a feat.