Content Insider #914 – You’re for Sale
By Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com
“Don’t forgive and never forget; Do unto others before they do unto you; and third and most importantly, keep your eye on your friends, because your enemies will take care of themselves.” – JR Ewing, “Dallas,” Lorimar Productions, 1978-1991)
Oh SNAP!
Facebook got ripped off to the tune of 267M member names/phone numbers…
YouTube discovered putting kiddie ads around their video content is a profitable but not a nice thing …
Folks are watching you watching your smart TV…
Cops are tapping into your Ring doorbell to watch your neighborhood and you? …
Your DNA info from the ancestor site just entered the nation’s database …
It joins your TSA facial scan …
You ordered a T-shirt online and are suddenly getting clothing suggestions from around the globe …
Everyone is waiting for you to tell them how you liked dinner at last evening’s restaurant …
Your Roomba just mapped out the floorplan of your house for folks …
Your smartwatch just sent you info on some new vitamins …
Your airline just asked when you were going to finish your flight reservations to Kauai …
Three hotels offered you some great get-away packages …
Your insurance company’s safe driver monitor (right) lets them adjust your insurance accordingly.
In other words, you’re …
There’s this old saying…Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Life was simple then.
Now, give a kid an Iphone and you can track him/her for life.
Screen Addiction – The smartphone is probably the best/worst thing that’s been invented (so far). It enables people to be in touch with the happenings of the world, in touch with others and be informed/entertained. It has also totally removed people from the realtime world.
What we can’t figure out is why the wireless service and phone producers insist on charging folks $500 – $1,000 + for a smartphone when you give them so much valuable stuff every minute of the day, day after day.
And all those pre-loaded and free apps?
Jeezz, they should be paying you!
“All the companies collecting this information act as what I called Tiny Brothers, using a variety of data sponges to engage in everyday surveillance,” said William Staples, founding director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas.
Oh, it’s all perfectly legal for these people to gather and sell this information because first of all, you consented to the tracking when you agreed to the user’s agreement.
Be honest. Have you ever read any user agreement?
Even if you had:
It’s okay though because:
Paul Ohm, of Georgetown University Law Center, noted, “Really precise, longitudinal geolocation information is absolutely impossible to anonymize.”
And your privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on your device.
Of course, if the app has an SDK (software development kit) that’s collecting data, there’s a good chance that data is being resold.
That’s not always bad because precise information like this enables marketing to understand the complete customer journey from seeing the ad to buying a product.
Then they have a much better idea what you want, what you buy and what convinced you to buy so they can help you repeat the process.
Gathering and using the data with today’s advanced AI and business analytics is what makes the web and business work, and it keeps all those services free.
IDC reports that business analytics has grown from $274B in 2022 to $320B this past year and was projected to be worth $540B in a couple of years.
AI is projected to have an even more rapid rise because it will be embedded … everywhere.
It’s a feature–not a bug!
As a recent NY Times investigative report (https://nyti.ms/2s323vt) noted, it’s also good for governments to track troublemakers and identify protestors.
Protecting Identity – When people protested in Hong Kong (and in other countries, cities around the globe) they increasingly use surgical masks to hide their identity from cameras that are everywhere.
The Hong Kong protest photo also brings to mind the proliferation of cameras – everywhere – and facial recognition.
China already has more than 400M surveillance cameras around the country tracking shoppers, preventing violent crimes, catching jaywalkers, whatever.
Virtually every Chinese citizen is in the facial database and a firm has proudly reported – (https://cnb.cx/2MACb15) they can identify citizens anywhere in mere seconds.
Facial ID – Advanced facial identity software can be used to quickly board a plane or pick a criminal out of a crowd; and while it’s pretty good, it still has a long way to go before it is 100 percent accurate.
When CBS “60 Minutes” Scott Pelley asked a college student if she wasn’t worried about the information that’s being collected about you and if citizens weren’t worried about their privacy, her response was, “Not that much.”
Of course, that’s China where freedom is slightly repressed.
Obviously, the same couldn’t happen in the Americas or Europe.
Freedom Varies – The degree of civil liberties and personal privacy varies around the globe. Sometimes people learn to live with it or live around it.
It’s true that there are cities like London where it’s estimated that the average Londoner will be captured on camera more than 300 times a day.
Or watch any cop show and the first thing they do is pull up the surveillance tapes for the area and even track individuals and vehicles from camera to camera in real time.
You really think they make this stuff up?
True, facial recognition already has problems with people of color, but that’s no reason to think that surveillance programs won’t be widely used in every country – if they aren’t already – all in the name of saving lives and property.
Ah, do we get a vote?
Yeah, didn’t think so!
Home Security, Privacy – Smart device manufacturers have done an excellent job of marketing home security, privacy and convenience along with the importance of your giving them data so they can do a better job of making life easier, better for you.
Of course, in the name of family/home convenience and security, people have jumped in with both feet as they snap up as many smart devices as possible, complete with all their security and privacy guidelines that folks read, digest, follow when they’re installed.
Yeah, right!
Google Nest, Amazon Ring and others were the second largest smart-device segment this past holiday (behind entertainment) and the global smart home market is projected to grow to $174.2 billion this year.
On the news every day leading up to Christmas there was coverage about thefts, suspicious persons captured on home surveillance systems and smart doorbells.
Entertain Me – The growing availability of streaming content has driven D2C entertainment to fantastic heights. While smart home devices are important to consumers, they are also difficult to integrate so they work smoothly together for the consumer.
Despite the fact that criminal statistics are supposedly the lowest in decades, fear-based news and social media (https://bit.ly/2Q4M4ok) have done a helluva’ job of fanning sales of products that good/bad folks can tap into to find out what’s going on in their neighborhood, your house.
All of the devices and apps are working hard every minute of the day to capture bits, bytes of information and data about everyone–supposedly to help everyone.
Every time you tell Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri to turn off a light, change streaming services, bring up the next segment of Landman or The Morning Show, data was dutifully captured and filed for use … later.
Keep it Coming – People are hooked on telling others about themselves, sharing pictures, documenting efforts/activities and at times giving the world a realtime look at what they’re doing and where. Occasionally, there’s a social media leak.
With the increased use of AI and machine learning, which require masses of data, it doesn’t take long for them to know more about you than you know about you.
In the process, they get so much data that occasionally they spill a little.
Much as we liked Samuel L. Jackson in Kingsman: The Secret Service, there was no master plan to develop an advanced global surveillance, monitoring, control system.
It just happened.
That’s probably why it’s so s****ed up!
Everyone wants a piece of the action and a big piece of you.
The “big five”—Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Facebook and Apple —came up with great ideas that would help them, help you, help them.
Along the way, they raked in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year.
They got real good at figuring out things and assisting you.
Just give them a little more information and they’ll help you, give you peace of mind.
You said, “Damn this is cool, here’s the info.”
They were able to sell more ads and sell the info to other folks who wanted to more efficiently, effectively “chat” with you and help you too.
Technology got better, they made more money and yes, you needed another screwdriver.
To protect you from yourself, the EU established the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
California set out similar privacy guidelines with the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) and other countries are thinking about it.
But trusting the government to solve it for you doesn’t seem too smart since they prove over and over, they have personal data needs too.
Apple saw the writing on the wall, so they began raising the stakes in privacy, making it an important part of their corporate and marketing strategy.
Most of the other players simply said they’ll follow the relevant privacy laws.
Free to Serve – There was no master plan for data security, data privacy just for individual companies to help people communicate so they could gather up information and data from everywhere. It not only works but it is exceedingly difficult to manage, control, supervise.
But that’s not going to put the surveillance/data capture genie back in the lantern.
People can’t wait to get up in the morning to share photos, posts, texts, emails and personal data– including their phone number, email address, location, type of devices they use, work, income level, race, religion and political views as well as the ads they click on.
You know … everything.
You can take an aggressive stand like JR Ewing did when he said, “Lots of men have tried to run roughshod over me. You can visit them in the cemetery.”
Or, you can resign yourself as the Chinese college student does and simply say, “I never think about it.”
Or, realize that the absolute right to privacy doesn’t exist and control the areas/data that are used are important to you.
Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com – is an author of more than 800 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software and applications. He is internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields. He also has an extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media and industry analysts/consultants.
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