Exactly what I've been saying about the NSA mass surveillance issue. It's not that many people are "okay with it" but that they don't truly understand what's going on.
If 1 in 2 people don't even realize their supermarket data is shared with others, how can we expect them to easily understand that the NSA is actually collecting their "dick pics" as well as everything else, including GPS locations, 3G tower locations, and so on? I strongly believe if most people actually understood what was going on, they'd be much more upset about it.
There's a reason why "tech people" are much more upset about it. It's not because they're "nerds" or anti-social or what have you. It's because they actually understand what's happening and what can be done with all of that data. And they also pay attention to hacks like the recent OPM one, where the government proves itself to be completely incompetent in keeping our data safe, enforcing the idea that neither the government nor companies should keep too much data about us and for very long.
If we could get "normal" people to have as much understanding about these privacy issues as tech people do, that could lead to some real privacy reforms.
As with other measures: show me that not using the card guarantees my privacy?
The only thing that is guaranteed is that I've lost the discount. Recording accounts from credit, debit, or check payments leaves the customer equally screwed.
More likely: I request loyalty cards under assumed names and discard or exchange them often.
Though that likely leads to other data trails. Anonymisation and tradecraft are hard.
This is absolutely preposterous. Scrubbing every single instance of data collection is obviously very difficult, but there are tons of high impact, low cost things you can do but that people choose not to do. That really belies the "people actually care but feel powerless" nonsense.
For example:
Browsing only in an incognito window prevents the persistence of many kinds of identity across browsing sessions, at the low cost of having to type a username and password more often. (I already do this for Facebook because their cookie policy passes my personal line. It's not a hardship at all, but that may be because when I have the power to change something I don't like I prefer doing it instead of simply whining and pretending I'm powerless).
Not using a loyalty card prevents tracking of your purchases and the only cost is the loss of a two percent discount.
Goimg to google's ad settings and turning off personalized ads. The cost is: ten seconds and seeing 10% more ads.
Counter-counterexample: EFF's Panopticlick shows how much individually identifying data can be obtained simply from browser fingerprints. IP address adds to that. Verizon was injecting tracking headers into its subscribers' Web traffic directly.
Again: the problem with countermeasures is that you've got to take a hell of a lot of them before you've any real assurance of even modest privacy.
See RMS's "How I do my computing" essay, featured here recently.
I did mention that "complete" privacy is rather costly, but I think it's silly to Ignore low cost countermeasures that have a high impact. Hell you can even defend against fingerprinting, which is basically a medium cost very high impact fix.
I also disagree that the stated countermeasures don't have much of an impact. The universe of entities that get any sort of picture of your behavior narrows VERY sharply, and the remaining holdouts (the govt, those who control the pipes) quite obviously require policy solutions
Yes, countermeasures can be taken. I apply a number of defenses myself:
? Multiple browser plugins: adblock, noscript/scriptsafe, ghostery, privacy badger, uMatrix. They work, variously, but also make browsing more of a pain. Applying these to, e.g., my parents' systems leads to inevitable (and difficult to diagnose remotely) issues. The median state of technical user competence is very low.
? Privoxy. Though not on my primary browsing sessions as it's routed through...
? Tor. If you want to destroy your browsing experience, route all traffic through Tor. Some sites flat out fail to function (e.g., Craigslist), generally because they block all traffic from proxies. Others repeatedly throw up captchas, including several (Cloudflare comes to mind) who rely on JS entirely, and cannot be bypassed for non-JS browsers. Also: pretty much all commandline tools (curl, wget, youtube-dl) are difficult or impossible over Tor, and you'll have to disable proxy for them. In other cases, Tor is seen as "suspicous activity" and triggers account protection, a/k/a self-triggered denial of service:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_... (also discussed on HN).
(Some way to be able to toggle multiple (or no) Privoxy modes easily would be useful.)
? An extensive set of /etc/hosts blocks. Drawn from uMatrix's blocklists, plus additions of my own. It's a total of 62,290 entries, including most common (and many uncommon) tracking and advertising sites.
Plus other practices in real-world tradecraft.
It's still 1) tedious and 2) only modestly effective.
Email, mobile comms use, and messaging generally remain far less protected than I'd prefer.
At least some NSA efforts are buried deeply in need-to-know mazes. How can POTUS tell NSA to stop what he has no way of knowing about? And how would he know whether they had stopped?
For those considering whether to read it, it's a powerful statement on consumer acceptance of privacy trade-offs:
Key findings on American consumers include that -
- 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that "If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing"
- 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that "It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge."
- 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that "It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me."
The authors go on to note that "only about 4% agree or agree strongly" with all three of the above propositions. And even with a broader definition of "a belief in tradeoffs" they found just a fifth (21%) were comfortably accepting of the idea.
I am interested in whether, if you turned the questions around and asked questions like "I want to give up my grocery store discount in exchange for the company running the store not collecting information about me", you would get the same results. Those loyalty cards are completely opt-in, the way they are used is widely known, and out in the real world with money on the line, people turn out to say "yes, I want this".
What does this tell us about the results of this survey?
That it may illustrate the article's premise: while people know what's going on with data collection, they believe they are powerless to stop it. Or that we have a society where 5% off is so important that people are willing to give up their privacy to get it.
> I am interested in whether, if you turned the questions around and asked questions like "I want to give up my grocery store discount in exchange for the company running the store not collecting information about me", you would get the same results.
That isn't the same question at all. The amount of the penalty for not using the loyalty card is chosen by the merchant and the merchant naturally chooses an amount that induces a majority of their customers to use it. That doesn't mean the customers like it.
The interesting question is to what extent the customer benefits from providing the merchant with the information outside of the artificial penalty. But in all likelihood providing the information has negative value to the customer, because the merchant can use the information against the customer, e.g. to better determine when they can get away with charging higher prices.
The trouble is that it's a collective action problem. Paying the penalty to opt out doesn't prevent the merchant from figuring out how to get more of your money without providing you with any additional value, because they can do it with a statistical sample of people who are like you but didn't opt out. So everyone is collectively worse off when a critical mass of people use the loyalty cards, but taking the "discount" is in the selfish interest of each person individually. Classic tragedy of the commons.
The way we solve problems like that is with legislation, e.g. by requiring merchants to charge the same price regardless of whether the customer uses a loyalty card.
It is of course not the same question: the article poses the question "would you like to have this nice thing?", and the reversed form I posed is "are you willing to pay for it?"
My immediate observation is that the majority of people will tend to say "yes" to the first and "no" to the second, and what we can learn from this is that mostly people tend to want.
I think you have rather casually tossed out the proposition that the status quo brings the customer negative value, without supplying any justification for that claim. I also think that your proposal of passing legislation to force all merchants to raise their lowest prices is unlikely to prove popular. (This proposal is commonly referred to as "increasing sales tax", and seems like it would be regressive in nature)
> It is of course not the same question: the article poses the question "would you like to have this nice thing?", and the reversed form I posed is "are you willing to pay for it?"
It isn't a matter of willingness to pay. If the seller doesn't want you to "buy" something (e.g. privacy) then they can set the price arbitrarily high so that you won't.
> I think you have rather casually tossed out the proposition that the status quo brings the customer negative value, without supplying any justification for that claim.
Why do you imagine the merchant is offering the "discount" if it isn't net profitable? When the merchant makes money by exploiting the data they collect, whose pocket does that money come out of?
> I also think that your proposal of passing legislation to force all merchants to raise their lowest prices is unlikely to prove popular.
I don't recall proposing that merchants be required to raise their prices, only that the prices they charge be the same regardless of whether customers use loyalty cards.
Merchant buys 5 units of item at $1 each and sells them at $3. Supplier makes $5 in revenue. 5 customers each get one item at $3. Merchant makes a profit of $10.
After:
Merchant buys 20 units of item A at $1 and sells them at $2. Supplier makes $20 in revenue. 20 customers each get one item at $2. Merchant makes a profit of $20.
Net profit: merchant is $10 richer, supplier is $15 richer, 20 customers are each $1 richer.
People have different resources and trade between them generates wealth. More trade generates more wealth. This is not a zero-sum game.
All your numbers are saying is that more trade occurs when middle men charge prices closer to their costs. But that isn't the problematic scenario. It's this one:
Before: Merchant buys 20 units of item A at $1 and sells them at $2. Supplier makes $20 in revenue. 20 customers each get one item at $2. Merchant makes a profit of $20.
After: Merchant buys 15 units of item A at $1 and sells them at $3. Supplier makes $15 in revenue. 15 customers each get one item at $3. Merchant makes a profit of $30.
Net profit: merchant is $10 richer, suppler is $5 poorer, 15 customers are each $1 poorer and five would-be customers can no longer afford the item.
The trade-maximizing margin for the merchant is the lowest possible margin, which is what maximizes overall utility because it increases the number of transactions without affecting the net utility per transaction. But the merchant isn't interested in maximizing trade, the merchant is interested in maximizing his own profit.
The way a merchant maximizes his own profit is to reduce margins on goods sold to price sensitive customers and raise margins on goods sold to price insensitive customers. So your theory has to be that giving merchants more information will cause them to reduce the prices of items sold to price sensitive customers more than they raise the price of items sold to price insensitive customers.
But selective pressure already destroys merchants who charge high margins to highly price sensitive customers. Anyone who does that loses all their business as soon as a competitor offers to sell for less. By contrast, merchants who charge slightly profitable but not maximally profitable prices to price insensitive customers can stay in business indefinitely, to the benefit of everyone but themselves, regardless of the prices charged by competitors.
Which implies that giving better pricing information to the merchants who have survived market forces will cause them to raise prices more than lower them.
why would loyalty cards be useless? aren't they supposed to help the merchants provide users with more 'relevant' services and an 'improved' experience? ;-)
...that people are bad at on-the-spot risk/reward analysis, and saying "...but you could save $.50 right now" is a powerful psychological device capable of reliably defeating rational thought and long-term reasoning for many people.
But that's not how those cards work. Usually, you need to collect points, or visits, or whatever, and only receive the benefit (prize, discount) at some point in the future. It's the opposite of 50¢ right now.
Not a fair comparison - the store can and will track my habits just as easily via the card I pay with. If I forsake the loyalty card, I don't get my privacy back - I just get tracked via another method unless I go out of my way to always carry enough cash to pay anonymously.
All the loyalty card does is allow them to track the occasional time I DO pay with cash, which is insignificant enough to be worth the discount. If a store made a genuine, binding offer to only track people with loyalty cards, THEN your question would be a valid comparison. At the moment, it just isn't.
I think the argument that people accept it is disingenuous. If it was broadly acceptable, why would businesses and governments often hide what they are doing? Why wouldn't they clearly inform consumers up front?
In fact, if consumers like it so much then why not advertise it, to attract more customers? Why haven't I seen this ad on TV?
At Acme, we collect your personal information and build an intimate profile of you -- everything you do, from your emails and web usage, to who your friends and family are, to your income, wealth and debts, to your medical and driving histories, to your interests in culture, religion and politics. You'd be amazed by what we've learned about you! The more we know about you, the better we can serve you!
Because people are irrational, and will give wildly different answers to fundamentally the same question, depending on the phrasing.
Because the reality is, people's lives have been continuously improving as more personal data has been collected and aggregated about them by various services and that now, more then ever, the transparency and accountability of governments has increased in response to many of those exact same services (Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/Google).
The metadata question gets asked contextlessly, which utterly changes its meaning. Google Now is pretty upfront (and obvious) of the type of data it's going to need to work. Given the value proposition, people are okay with that and why should they not be?
So they shouldn't be empowered to make decisions for themselves? What 'rational' person will decide what is best for these people, as well as altruistically understand and protect their interests?
I like how Microsoft made a point with Cortana to put what it knows about the user in a "notebook" that you can browse and edit. Whenever it does something smart, like suggest that it track a flight, it lets you ask "How do you know this?"
This doesn't make anything harder to use, just more transparent.
It's just one of those things you say about any privileges of corporations that are endangered due to emerging public comprehension and opinion. You're not supposed to challenge it, just to feel like a sadly misguided Luddite on a Sisyphean quest to hold back the inevitable march of technology.
>now, more then ever, the transparency and accountability of governments has increased in response to many of those exact same services (Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/Google).
I'm skeptical. Sure, advocates for transparency have used these platforms, but that seems unrelated to these companies' mass collection of data.
Not to mention that one of the biggest whistleblowers recently (Edward Snowden) revealed that these companies were complicit in NSA's not-at-all transparent surveillence.
This post perfectly illustrates the "people are irrational" assertion. Snowden's documents (re-)revealed that these companies were involved in targeted surveillance for the FBI by way of NSLs, something that the companies had warned about for years. http://www.wired.com/2013/04/google-fights-nsl/
The new bit of information from Snowden was that the NSA could access data from the FBI, which none of the companies knew about, let alone were "complicit" in.
1. Corporation collects user data.
2. Government wants access to that data, in secret.
3. Corporation lets people know when the government accesses data about them.
4. Hurrah, the government is more transparent.
If the corporation didn't collect the data in the first place, there would be nothing for the government to request access to, transparently or not.
Here is a perfect example of irrationality. These companies process data that the user wants them to process (emails and other conversations that the user can search from any of their devices). Not collecting that data would obviously (to everybody except irrational people like scribu) make those products impossible to implement. That same data that is so useful to the users is also useful to the FBI and anybody else investigating a person.
I don't understand how your claim (that users want the products that data collection enables) refutes my claim (that data collection has not helped with government transparency).
If your point is merely that "data collection has not helped with government transparency," I do not refute it (and I know of nobody who would -- there is no reason that Gmail nor banking nor even the price of tea in China would help with government transparency). That is, however, a rather inane point to make.
I think it is unrelated to their mass collection of data. But I also think this is an argument for why people put up with these services. It's not that they accept privacy infringement, it's that they are willing to put up with it to have an open communications platform.
Because some percentage of the population is made up of psychopaths lacking empathy who are willing to do things that the majority of the population cannot fathom.
...and some of them are very intelligent and very clever, and are able to rise to positions of power, wherein they get to make decisions about what's OK and what's not from a morality standpoint.
We all get to decide for ourselves what is and isn't okay from a morality standpoint. Just because someone is in a position of influence it doesn't mean you need to to take their word for it.
I'd love to use Google Now on my Nexus but I cannot accept the trade off. Constantly following me around and analysing my search history is somehow like peeping under my clothes to see all the warts and all. I'm a nobody so the invasiveness isn't really that important but somehow I just can't accept it. However the product itself looks awesome.
Someone needs to come up with anonymous profiles rather than linked to a name and then people like me might be more inclined to use such services.
The thing is, that's all well and good, but advertisers want more personal info, and they're the ones paying the bills. If users paid the bills, they'd probably have more choice. As of right now, that's not the way most internet things work (sadly).
> the transparency and accountability of governments has increased in response to many of those exact same services
please don't pretend the problem is solved because small parts of it came out in the open two years ago.
very little has changed, and the battle is still ahead.
Google might have publicly stood up against government spying in particular (hey, who wouldn't be pissed off if the gov hacked and tapped into your private internal networks), but they are not at all innocent in the War on Privacy, when it comes to their own goals (whether that be advertising, stakeholder value or even their current good-guys motto like "organizing the world's information") they are willing to do exactly the same things.
we're heading towards a future where mega-corporations like Google, Apple, Unilever (etc etc) will be entities operating on the same level and scale as nation-states. indeed cyberpunk professed.
so it doesn't make sense to me at all to trust Google any more with my private data than I would trust the US, or the Dutch government / secret service.
or let's put it another way, because I just happen to have not been born a US citizen, it means that according the USA, I have no right to privacy at all (I've seen people argue this even on HN). the USA is in a unique position because almost all Internet traffic passes through a US network at some point, and my data is completely fair game for the NSA to slurp up, process and store in any way they see fit.
now, my smartphone happens to be Android. so in this future, similar to a US citizen, my data would be protected by whatever little rights Google's privacy policy provides me. but not Apple's privacy policy. so any time I'd message an iPhone user ... get it? but it gets even crazier, because I sent my message with WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, of course the network is US territory, and so my bits spread around the world like glitter lipstick.
and all the while, just like today, everybody keeps arguing that it's okay to slurp the other's data, because their parent-entity needs that data to protect them. that idea, that very US-vs-THEM reasoning, is why mega-corporations and branding (as we've seen since the early 80s, described by Naomi Klein) are pretty much the same phenomenon. it wasn't quite as obvious back then, but it's the new nationalism for the new nation-states. "Google can have my data, because I'm a Googlian", "it's okay that Apple steals their data to protect us, because they are not iPeople, like us"
Tries to make good points but indulged in so much hyperbole that I had to stop reading. Words like "stolen", "lie", "heist", etc. I do think there's a case to be made that online companies misrepresent to users how they deeply they track them and use their data. But going overboard and pretending that having somebody know some statistics about you in a de-identified and aggregated manner is some heinous invasion of your personal privacy equivalent to someone sitting with a spy camera watching you in your bathroom - that is completely unhelpful in the other direction.
There's enormous genuine value in this kind of data. That is, mutual win-win value to consumers and end users and companies that learn to understand the data. At the extreme there are a whole range of diseases where the only real hope of curing them explicitly depends on us gathering enough data to find cures. At a much more subtle level, a rental car company knowing enough about its users to accurately predict when and where they are likely to want cars helps everyone and gets you cheaper prices and better availability.
The problem at the moment is that this issue has become recognised as a way to attack advertising based internet companies and is thus being exploited by their competitors. Those competitors don't care whether the baby is thrown out with the bath water - in fact, if the baby goes all the better because it's not an area of strategic advantage for them. So they might as well sabotage all of it to get a bit of commercial advantage, and screw it if consumers and society are the worse off for it. We need to be cognisant that much of the heat around this is created by this being a commercial battle ground and the actual issues are much more nuanced and need more careful thought.
I think what tech companies do with information collected is absolutely no different from identity theft. They help themselves to quite a lot more than what any of their terms of service statements regard, and seem to be using said datum for increasingly nefarious aims.
In that respect, terms like "stolen", "lie", "heist", etc, are wholly apropos.
> mutual win-win value to consumers and end users and companies that learn to understand the data
Isn't it up to consumers to decide whether it is a "win" for them? Many do not. I don't feel it's a win for me, at least not as it's currently structured.
> The problem at the moment is that this issue has become recognised as a way to attack advertising based internet companies and is thus being exploited by their competitors.
Do you have something to support this? It sounds a little conspiratorial.
I'm a bit surprised by some of the mistaken consumer beliefs cited in the article. For example:
> 65% do not know that the statement “When a website has a privacy policy, it means the site will not share my information with other websites and companies without my permission” is false.
Do people really not understand that having a policy on a particular topic does not imply anything about the contents of said policy?
> 55% do not know it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day.
Why would people expect there to be a law prohibiting this? It's no different (conceptually) from a small boutique shop that doesn't use price tags charging an enthusiastic student a lower price than a wealthy collector. For a more institutionalized example, membership in various organizations has provided unadvertised discounts on tangentially related products and services for a long time.
> 62% do not know that price-comparison sites like Expedia or Orbitz are not legally required to include the lowest travel prices.
Again, this shouldn't be surprising. They don't advertise that they show the lowest price. They're not even capable of guaranteeing that they show the lowest price, as some airlines won't share pricing data with them.
> 55% do not know it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices...
> 62% do not know that price-comparison sites like Expedia or Orbitz are not legally required...
Statements like tell me that the survey was biased. It's making it seem like these companies are doing something that should be illegal when all they are doing is charging what the market will bear.
There are many situations in which "charging what the market will bear" is illegal. We have legal price controls, and restrictions on what/how items can be sold, in many asset classes.
If places can profit from operating in the margins where the law is shaky and they're unlikely to be challenged on their choices (risk vs reward), they probably will.
Determining "what the market will bear" without revealing the full range of market options isn't fair practice. Particularly where Expedia or Orbitz effectively are the market.
I used to be surprised by such things, but now I'm not. Search for "things Americans believe" or something similar; it's not exactly the same kind of knowledge respresented in the article, but it gives you an idea of the range of understanding out there:
* Only 38% can name all three branches of the U.S. government (executive, legislative and judicial) One-third are unable to correctly name any of the branches. [5]
* Only 78% know that the first ten amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. [5]
* Only 51% know that a two-thirds majority vote by Congress is needed to overturn a presidential veto. [5]
* 29% of Americans cannot name the Vice President [4]
* 18% believe the Sun revolves around the Earth [1]
* 37% of voters believe global warming is a hoax (in 2013) [3]
* 21% of voters say a UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up [3]
* Over 25% believe in Astrology [2]
* 13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ [3]
* 15% of voters say the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals [3]
* 5% believe exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons [3] (5% seems low? Have you talked to 20 people today? Also: That's over 15 million Americans.)
* 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power [3] (Over 12 million Americans)
The "lizard people" thing seems hard to believe even at 4%. Maybe that's the number who answered that way on a poll because they thought it was hilarious? (Plus a few who actually believe that.) Checking your source now.
>> 65% do not know that the statement “When a website has a privacy policy, it means the site will not share my information with other websites and companies without my permission” is false.
>Do people really not understand that having a policy on a particular topic does not imply anything about the contents of said policy?
"Privacy policy" is PR language. They're really information sharing and retention policies, but intentionally named to falsely imply that they are a document for a company's strategy for implementing the policy that people prefer - which is to keep everything private unless asked.
People are complicated, and are at least somewhat irrational. So polling is hard, and is prone to bias and manipulation. But two observations are solid. First, most people are entirely clueless about technical matters. Second, most people believe that meaningful privacy is either impossible or unworkably complicated.
I recall discussion from the mid 90s, as ad-funded commercialization of the Internet accelerated, about impact on privacy. I'm not arguing that there was much privacy in the early Internet. But privacy was another available path. Now there's meaningful privacy only on the alleys and back roads of the Internet.
I don't have any answers. But I do know that meaningful privacy is incompatible with the current ad-funded Internet. Maybe there's a workable way to deindividualize tracking data. Maybe anonymous blockchain nanopayments would work as an alternative. Google ought to take the lead on this, I think.
Is ad funded and and privacy really incompatible. For example, radio is a largely ad funded medium, but the technology is inherently private. Tracking might make adds more valuable, but they are not worthless. Especially if you condisder that adviters could still do the type of content driven targeting that they have done on previus mediums (that is to say, it is not a privacy violation to say that the readers of a particular piece of content are interested in that type of content).
Maybe so. Maybe Internet advertising developed with tracking simply because tracking was so easy, and wasn't not prohibited. So there's strong selection for accurate tracking. But that doesn't say that privacy-friendly advertising is impossible.
I do get that it's naive to ask Google etc to take the lead. They're just doing what's rational in the current regulatory environment. But who can create Internet-wide incentives?
Bitcoin has solved distributed money. But distributed social networking is still a hard problem to solve. That's why people take what they can get. They host their own blogs with Wordpress, the web is distributed, but social networks are all centralized silos!
Except for that "everything you buy goes on the perpetual record of the blockchain" bit. And the fact that the one anonymous transaction most ably facilitated by Bitcoin is fraud.
Why do companies seek more information on customers? Read their own fucking marketing collateral.
Companies aren't falling over themselves to grab every last piece of personal data available in order to push their own prices through the floor. Don't be ridiculous.
They're doing it:
? To find prospects who can't see their way out of a bad deal.
? To find prospects who are highly inclined to spend. A wonderful Spanish proverb I discovered recently is "Buy from desperate people, and sell to newlyweds." Find those who absolutely need cash (even at pennies on the dollar) for their belongings, and buy from them. Find those with stars in their eyes, and sell to them. Look at the office furniture market: fire/liquidation sales (buy) and startups (sell).
? To sow market confusion to the point that meaningful distinctions simply cannot be made.
? To upsell, to increase conversions, to tack on additional fees, to tie people into service contracts. All that bullshit.
Aon on Retail and Insurance:
Retailers have a chance to improve operating margins by 60 percent, McKinsey projects.
...
"Data has always been important in the underwriting process, but now the depth and breadth of available data has led to a dramatic increase in focus. The quality of data can be a key factor in securing coverage, in obtaining the best possible terms and conditions, and in setting equitable premiums. On behalf of our clients, we collect and collate data that we then present to insurance markets and use as a negotiating tool.
Based on the purchase behavior information you gathered from your sales receipts, you could consider running a few targeted seasonal promotions to capitalize on the behaviors you’ve observed. For example, if people year after year tend to buy similar products during a particular month, then consider running a promotion to further incentivize that specific product during that time of year.
Analytics can turn this “big data” into the kind of insight that enables companies to stand apart. In fact, analytics will be a deciding factor that determines whether companies succeed or fail. Those able to effectively tap data for game-changing insights can capitalize on virtually endless opportunities.
Using SAS software (a large enterprise analytic platform):
Using SAS solutions, we combine above median usage metrics – recency, depth, duration, high value content – with other online conversions to identify a customer acquisition opportunity or trigger alerts for our current customer marketing efforts.... By enhancing outbound nurture emails with web behavior and topics of interest, you become more proficient with your targeting....
A flipside of this is that there's no general guarantee that not participating in such services affords much by way of protection.
You're already creating copious datastreams:
? Your address is available : USPS (or foreign equivalent), USPS NCOA file, DMV, voting registration, payroll processors, magazine subscriptions, addressbook snooping from other parties' records.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-po...
? Your place of employment: payroll processor, banking records, LinkedIn.
? Purchases: Credit card, debit card, loyalty programs, checks, retail-site tracking (phone signal or WiFi monitoring).
? Your general consumer preferences are bracketed: Age, sex, home address, income, educational data, magazine subscriptions, purchasing daa.
? Your email exchanges: Even if you don't use Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or other major email service providers, people and businesses you rely on do. If you've communicated with them, or even if you haven't, your data are there.
? General location information: cellphone tracking data.
? Annual driving data (miles): state smog data, insurance processors, toll tags..
? Online activities: IP address, ISP, browser fingerprints.
? Generally: data, information, photos, events, etc., entered about you by third parties into online or offline, public or private, systems.
So: you can try to take specific steps to make small portions of your data, but it's rather like building a dam when you're 1) already neck-deep in water and 2) surrounded on all sides. Until you can create a comprehensive and nonpermeable barrier, you see little benefit.
Opting out offers you little additional privacy, and costs you the discounts or other benefits provided.
Possible alternative: opt in but under your own terms. Fuzz data, share cards or identifiers with others, use tokens (phones, toll tags, credit cards, etc.) for a brief time, then discard them or, better, exchange them with someone else.
If 1 in 2 people don't even realize their supermarket data is shared with others, how can we expect them to easily understand that the NSA is actually collecting their "dick pics" as well as everything else, including GPS locations, 3G tower locations, and so on? I strongly believe if most people actually understood what was going on, they'd be much more upset about it.
There's a reason why "tech people" are much more upset about it. It's not because they're "nerds" or anti-social or what have you. It's because they actually understand what's happening and what can be done with all of that data. And they also pay attention to hacks like the recent OPM one, where the government proves itself to be completely incompetent in keeping our data safe, enforcing the idea that neither the government nor companies should keep too much data about us and for very long.
If we could get "normal" people to have as much understanding about these privacy issues as tech people do, that could lead to some real privacy reforms.
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