7
Big Data
I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.
—Rudyard Kipling1
In the digital world today, we leave clues about our lives all over the place. This is why there is a big business in “data integration.” Acxiom, for example, maintains billions of records on hundreds of millions of individuals, with up to a thousand “identity elements” per individual. These are built of data from all the following and more:
- Telephone directories
- Fishing, hunting, boating, and pilot licenses
- Property file and assessor records for more than 100 million properties
- Voter registration
- Proprietary files from multiple industries
- Numerous proprietary data sets
- Criminal files
- Professional licenses
- More than 40 million businesses (including, we assume, retailers)2
Then there are businesses that put tracking files in your browser to report on your movements around the Web, or that follow crumb trails left by the “location services” in your smartphone. Wouldn’t all that intelligence paint a pretty clear picture of who you are, what you like to buy, and much more—including, for example, where you are now, where you’ll go next, and what kind of credit and money you’re carrying?
Not in my case, and I suspect not in yours, either.
First, you could take all the available data in the world about me and still not know the three things I go to Shaw’s for. (And I’ll bet, now that it’s in a book, retailers still won’t know. There’s also a good chance my tastes will change anyway.)
Second, I’m not involved in all this data crunching. At best, my input to data integration services is minimal.
Case in point: Rapleaf. According to the Wall Street Journal (in its What They Know series, mentioned earlier), Rapleaf is the biggest player in the new personalization game. Here’s what Rapleaf says about itself on the company’s Web site:
Rapleaf is a San Francisco-based startup with an ambitious vision: we want every person to have a meaningful, personalized experience—whether online or offline. We want you to see the right content at the right time, every time. We want you to get better, more personalized service. To achieve this, we help Fortune 2000 companies gain insight into their customers, engage them more meaningfully, and deliver the right message at the right time. We also help consumers understand their online footprint.3
Not to brag, but I have a large online footprint. I’ve lived on the Web since 1995. I’ve disclosed a great deal about my life through my blog, since 1999, to millions of readers. I surf the Web all day, almost every day, on two laptops, a phone, an iPad, and more different browsers than I’ll bother to count. My phone contains hundreds of apps, many of which are reporting personal information to advertisers and third parties. I’ve put up thousands of tweets for more than fifteen thousand followers on Twitter. I have many hundreds of friends on Facebook and a CV on LinkedIn that is filled out in great detail. And then there are those fifty thousand photos on four Flickr accounts I talked about back in chapter 4. So I figured Rapleaf should know a boatload of juicy stuff about me.
To find out, I went to Rapleaf’s site in January 2011, registered, and checked my profile. What I found there was (drum roll …) not much.4 Table 7-1 shows what I copied and pasted from its page about me:
The zip code it had was wrong, so I removed it. (The only choice other than leaving it wrong, oddly.) Its guess of our household income was also wrong (it was on the high side). I removed that too (which I would have done in any case). The rest I left as you see in the table. There’s not much to say about it, because it doesn’t say much.
Six months later, in June 2011, nine of the sixteen categories still had wrong information, including the ten-year-old zip code I had removed in the last visit.
In December 2010, two months after Rapleaf got raked over the coals by the Wall Street Journal (“A Web Pioneer Profiles Users by Name,” “Thousands of Web Users Delete Profiles From RapLeaf,” “Privacy Advocate Withdraws from RapLeaf Advisory Board,” “How to Get Out of Rapleaf’s System,” “RapLeaf’s Founder on Privacy, Business”), the Rapleaf company blog ran a series titled “The 12 Days of Personalization.”5 Day 12 begins,
As we know by Day 12, personalization is all about companies giving you what you want, when you want it. Companies can utilize personalization in their email marketing campaigns to create valued relationships between their customers and brands …
Bringing targeted, high-value purchase opportunities directly to a viewer greatly increases the chances that a browser will become a buyer. And they will thank you for it.6
This is fantasy. Twelve years have passed since Christopher Locke joked in The Cluetrain Manifesto about marketers’ wacky wish to turn the Internet into “TV with a buy button,” and here’s Rapleaf, calling us “viewers” and imagining that we’ll thank them for yet another annoyance—only now a personal one.7
Eat your spinnage
In recent years, business publications have become thick with stories about Big Data, and how crunching that data is going to be the Big Thing for Big Business and lots of start-ups. The assumption by writers and their sources is that Big Data needs Big Clouds (from the companies selling products and services for both). I just looked up “big data” (with the quotes) in Google News. Top stories include:
- “CIOs Jump Into Clouds for Big Data Sharing.” Internet Evolution
- “Forrester Research Analyst Advocates Integration of Big Data …” TMC
- “Big Data’s Integration Hurdles.” IT Business Edge (blog)
- “Startup Aims to Create Big Apps for Big Data.” GigaOM
- “Time to Analyze All That Big Data.” IT Business Edge (blog)
No doubt every store with a loyalty program is already being pitched “solutions” of the sort pumped in those news stories. In the last bulleted item, writer Mike Vizard points toward a McKinsey report titled, “Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.”8 It’s thick with juicy facts and findings, artfully organized, and addressed to McKinsey’s constituency: large companies and governments. But here’s one paragraph that speaks directly to where we live (or go):
Geo-targeted mobile advertising is one of the most common ways organizations can create value from the use of personal location data. For example, consumers who choose to receive geo-targeted ads might have a personalized advertisement for a favorite store pop up on their smartphone when they are close to that store. Or a smartphone user meeting with friends at a bar or restaurant might receive a coupon offer for drinks or food from that establishment … Compared with more traditional forms of advertising such as TV or print, geo-targeted campaigns appear to have higher relevance to the consumer at the moment when a purchase decision is likely to be made and therefore boost the potential for an actual sale. Advertisers certainly seem to believe this to be the case, and they are paying increased rates for this service compared with advertising without geo-targeting.9
Not bad, I suppose. But also not good enough, because the customer—the one enjoying the “consumer surplus”—is still a calf to cows producing Big Data fortified milk (and, of course, cookies).
My vote for the best authority on totally personalized data goes to Jeff Jonas, chief scientist, IBM Entity Analytics Group, and IBM distinguished engineer. He came to IBM through acquisition of Systems Research and Development (SRD), which he founded in 1984. In addition to assisting the United States in national security and counterterrorism efforts, SRD worked for Las Vegas casinos, designing and developing methods for spotting cheaters and cheating patterns. Jeff’s work has been featured in movies and many TV shows, as well as in academic and business journals.
On August 16, 2009, Jeff put up a landmark blog post titled, “Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!”10 Here are the money paragraphs:
Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below 10 meters …
With the data out and specialized analytics emerging, this infant industry is already doing some pretty amazing work. Your space-time-travel data makes where you live and where you work self-evident, and it reveals your most frequent, periodic, infrequent and rare destinations … information certainly useful to attentive direct marketing folks.
This kind of thing sets off privacy alarms all over the place, naturally. And, in the absence of conscience by companies doing the collecting and crunching—plus a near-complete absence of control tools for users—privacy advocates turn toward government for help. And they’re getting results, sort of.
One is the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011,” sponsored by Senator Jay Rockefeller.11 It would require the FTC “to prescribe regulations regarding the collection and use of personal information obtained by the tracking of online activity of an individual, and for other purposes.” Around that same time, an FTC staff report made clear that the commission would rather not do that, preferring guidelines, principles, and “educating business” options.12 A Commerce Department “green paper” on the same topic is packed with buzzword compounds like “Bolstering Consumer Trust Online Through 21st Century Fair Information Practice Principles.”13
I could cite many more of the same, none of which give “consumers” any hope of rescue by the Feds.