Guilty of Aggregation
-
This is kind of funny; a humorous entry by Donald Farmer on data mining by retailers. It's a joke and talks about retailers mining data and using it to further their own sales at the expense of privacy or an individual's rights.
It's a joke at times, but it's also a problem. I know that many lenders of student loans were locked out of the National Student Loan database following reports that they were "mining" the database in order to market products to students that had received aid. I'm sure similar types of analysis take place all the time with public records and it highlights one of the problems with making the data available online, as Google wants to do. While I would love to be able to access more records without driving down to a county office - in my case, this means driving a long way - I don't want anyone abusing the privilege to gather lots of information and market it.
It's kind of one of those unintended consequences. Someone does a good thing and makes data available easily to everyone, say like checking for a domain name on the Internet. Then someone else decides there's a way to profit by using that data to get there first, like buying up domains that are searched for and holding them hostage, forcing someone to buy them back.
Data mining is an incredibly powerful technology. When I think of BI, this is actually one of the first things that comes to mind, both in the technological as well as business sense. But it's also dangerous. Drawing conclusions from data is hard and it's easy to make mistakes. If I start buying diapers, is it because we had a baby or because my brother's in town with his three little ones that require them? Hard to know and you have to build in safeguards and margins of error.
I know that more and more data mining will take place as companies look to gain advantages over their competitors. I just hope that they are careful about the conclusions they draw and realize there's no certainty when predicting humans. Other than we're unpredictable.
-
They'll be as careful or otherwise as profit dictates.
-
What's interesting to note is that retailers can still do this data mining now, it just costs more due to the fact that they have to hire someone to go out and collect all the data from the manually, then bring it back in to load and mine. So keeping this data in a more inaccessible location doesn't really keep anyone from mining it; this manner of protection only protects against small to medium businesses and, potentially, individuals who are looking for their next con job.
Another way of looking at this, then, is that large firms have the potential and might already be doing a lot more than just pulling data from accessible, online sources and hurting the chances for small shops to compete.
The lines are blurred on this one. Perhaps the best solution, if privacy is the aim, would be to restrict access to private or personal information altogether. However, if privacy doesn't matter and everyone wants better targeted advertising, maybe we should side with Google.
-
Marketing is a huge business, just look at the money spent on 30 second adds in the Super Bowl. One of the benefits of all the data mining is that this marketing can be more focused. We are always going to receive unsolicited marketing material but wouldn't it be better to at least receive an offer related to your interests... rather then just a bunch of credit card apps. I shop at a Grocery store chain that uses a customer loyalty card to give you discounts on certain items purchased. I'm sure they do this to track everything I purchase. They should be mining the information to send me coupons directly related to what I purchase. Better yet, combine this with public information. I have a new set of twins, so any coupon for diapers will get me in the store... and based on my previous buying patterns I would probably purchase higher profit items... especially around 5-7pm when I'm hungry after a day of work
Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply