Tracking Every Pitch

There were many great parts to the book and movie Moneyball.  If you have not either read it or seen it – you should.  In addition to the great storytelling by Michael Lewis, the main theme resonates in our business and just about everywhere:  we now have the capability to track everything.  This may not seem like a big jump from the prior method of measurement by sampling, but it is a big big deal.  Sampling is the Nielsen ratings: where a small population of representative viewers track their TV habits and the results are applied to the total population.  The tracking everything equivalent is having every single set top box send in data for every single viewer.  The story in Moneyball helps to demonstrate the difference.  To know from sampling that a pitcher behind in the count is 25% more likely to throw a fast ball than anything else – could help you.  If you know from measuring everything that this particular pitcher is more likely to throw a fastball on the next pitch because you have a complete database of every pitch he has thrown in the past 5 seasons – well, that is different.

For the past decade, businesses have been making this same transition.  From sampling data about their customers to tracking everything.  The leaders in this revolution will win.  The businesses that understand this will jump very far ahead of their competitors.  The businesses that do not understand this will say that a statistically significant sample is the same as a complete database and will not go to the effort to track everything.  They will lose.  Some businesses, like the grocery stores, are tracking our every purchase, but I just don’t think they know what they have in the data.  Here is my post from last year on that topic. 

Governments will be in a unique position to capitalize on the data they collect.  A dramatic example of that is happening right here in the Seattle area with the tolls starting on the 520 bridge.  I can go online and see a record of every time my car has gone across the bridge.  Imagine the possibilities here!  Not only could parents or insurance companies learn about driving patterns, but some super smart PHD is going to figure out how to match up drivers for ride sharing – by evaluating the driving patters in the data.  Or I could sign up for a service that sends my family a text when my car passes the tolling camera – that calculates what time I will be home based on the other traffic data.

In our marketing services business, we started tracking every single interaction about five years ago.  Before that, the proprietary closed databases in many of our systems aggregated data – because storage space in the database was more valuable than individual activity records.  Sounds hard to believe given the current environment, but these old databases actually wrote over themselves every night – just to save hard disk space.  As a result we have pretty good predictive data on what will happen if we email an email address, or call a phone number, based on our past experience.  Using that experience data, we direct resources to the highest value activities first.  It is a game changing practice. 

Privacy experts say that this kind of customer data collection is an invasion and should be made illegal.  There definitely are steps that should be taken to protect the consumer and protect the data.  Increasingly however, customers are demanding that the businesses that serve them know their stuff.  Today there are many simple requests that I want in this area.  I want Amazon to tell me if I am buying a book for the second time.  I want the credit card department at my bank to realize that I already have a credit card and to stop calling me with new credit card offers.  I want Starbucks to know my order before I order it.  I want Delta airlines to know what seats l have sat in.  This is just the beginning.

My Track

I have been a boater for a long time.  Ever since the advent of navigation software in the early 90s I have been accumulating tracks.  Those dotted lines that follow my boat across the electronic chart.  I am closing in on twenty years of tracks and going back and looking at them would be fun.  I have upgraded and changed platforms to the extent that going back and mining those tracks is probably more work than I will ever do.  Maybe some long dark winter.

Now with GPS in my cars and phone, creating my personal track could be pretty fun.  When i think of the ultimate personal new years day review of the prior year, it would be cool to replay my track for the year on a globe.  I suspect it will be a few years until it is easy enough to do this.  For starters, right now I have no idea how to get my gps data out of my car.

If pressed to guess who will figure this out, I would say it will be Google.  Mash together an android phone and maps and presto.  Zoom right into street view and it would be just like reliving any part of my past.  Cool....  Yikes!  Some of this information could be sensitive.  Do I want to see my personal track badly enough to give that data to Google?

This brings up the best tweet I saw this week:  If you are notpaying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” I think this is attributed to @lawrencebrown.  It is more accurate to say that your data is being sold. 

As we rush into using these cool new gizmos we are going to have to think more about this stuff.

Facebook Blocks Out the Sun

Here is an amazing graphic that shows how Facebook's privacy settings have changed since 2005.  I would say it was day in 2005 and closing in on night now -- who knows what is next.  

There is no shortage to people giving the thumbs down to Facebook these days -- we just may be at the inflection point where something else takes the stage. I have been following the tech pundits/journalists and most of them seem to be souring on Facebook:   Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Gillmore, and their peers all seem to be giving the Facebook "like" idea a thumbs down.  

So, what next?  Even Mark Pincus is turning away -- and he (Zynga) has benefited from Facebook more than anyone other than Zuck himself!

Could it be time to start taking back identity management with a service like ClaimID?

Which is Dead: Privacy or Trust?

Do you read End User License Agreements or Terms of Service when you sign up for a new online service?  I don't.  What is the point in reading beyond the "reserves the right to change this agreement from time to time" part.  That's right, we click that we agree, and then the agreement changes.  

This is a particularly acute problem when it comes to free services where all we are giving up is our privacy information.  If we pay for a service, we have a fighting chance to argue that the payment was made based on the agreement and that it cannot change "materially".  But when the service is free -- the sky is the limit on the changes.

So what happens?  We generally skip the reading and expect the worst from the vendors.  Facebook's recent moves have not helped reverse this trend.

As new services are dreamed up, and companies created around them, the realm of possibilities is limited by the lack of trust we have in the system owners.  In response to this situation some people have proclaimed privacy dead.  I think it is the other way around:  trust is dead.

DataPortability.org