Segmentation of one (continued)

By now, most people know who Google is and what Google does. Google serves billions of online users in this country and around the world …  With little or no revenue from its users, Google still manages to turn a healthy profit by selling advertisements within its products that rely in substantial part on users’ personal identification information … in this model, the users are the real product.”
US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal
.

The “Segmentation of one” blog from last week spoke of how existing and prospective operational tools can deliver powerful personalised marketing messaging.

As stated, there is always going to be an ethical dilemma in relation to this level of personalisation / privacy though.

The old adage states that if you’re not paying for a product, then by default you ARE the product. This hasn’t been so common in the telco world but has become more commonly accepted by the Internet generation (whether implicitly or not is arguable).

Personalised services that would have been deemed inappropriate in the 90’s are now considered acceptable in situations where users opt in for a service if they find it valuable enough to hand over personal information for.

OSS tools are able to contribute towards highly personalised data collection and management. Whether they should is a whole other story – a story that has explicit disclosure, product pricing model, privacy policy, opt-in / opt-out and many other divisive chapters in it.

Where do you sit on the privacy continuum?

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