Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

Have we reached Peak Data?

Matt’s publishing a newsletter on the past, present, and future of tracking:

The last 100 years have been a journey to see how to measure ghosts - how to measure the invisible audiences at the end of technological distribution networks. With every decade, these ghosts have come more and more into focus, ending with a the last ten years of social media and digital advertising that has created unimaginable amounts of data about everything we see, read, click and like.

He sees the pendulum swinging the other way now …for those who can afford it:

If there’s one constant in the economics of audience data over the last 100 years, is that we only get free services if we pay for them with our attention. This has been true for commercial radio and television, free newspapers, mobile games and digital content. If we want privacy, we have to pay for it, and not everyone can afford this. Will the right to become a ghost only be for the people with money to buy premium products?

as days pass by — Collecting user data while protecting user privacy

Really smart thinking from Stuart on how the randomised response technique could be applied to analytics. My only question is who exactly does the implementation.

The key point here is that, if you’re collecting data about a load of users, you’re usually doing so in order to look at it in aggregate; to draw conclusions about the general trends and the general distribution of your user base. And it’s possible to do that data collection in ways that maintain the aggregate properties of it while making it hard or impossible for the company to use it to target individual users. That’s what we want here: some way that the company can still draw correct conclusions from all the data when collected together, while preventing them from targeting individuals or knowing what a specific person said.

Email Tracking and Paperless Banking – Dan Q

Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.

On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy | CSS-Tricks

Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.

I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.

He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.