Digital Marketing. Annmarie Hanlon
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Simkin who highlighted potential abuses at different stages from transaction, gathering knowledge, the ongoing relationship and integrity. The main issues raised were (De Cremer et al., 2017, p. 150):
Information misuse – abusing the data held about the customer
Privacy issues – collecting health and personal fitness data and selling online
Switching barriers – making it less attractive or difficult to switch providers
Favouritism and discrimination – micro-segmentation based on shared customer behaviour
Unfairness – discriminating against certain user types, such as higher prices to Mac users
Dishonesty – cross-selling potentially unwanted or unneeded products based on behaviour
Financial penalties – only benefiting clients wearing fitness devices and penalising those that won't
Confusing customers – only providing complex pricing models
Activity 1.3 Create Your Internet of Things
1 In groups discuss what would help university life within the Internet of Things.
2 Consider what elements could be connected.
3 What benefits could this bring?
4 What concerns do you have about your Internet of Things?
1.6 Big data
The Internet of Things groups together big data (see Key Term) from a range of different sources. This can be both positive and negative, as we have previously seen.
Health insurance companies know your age, job role, where you live, whether you drive far for work, your family composition, typical diet, height, weight, health problems and where you visit on holidays. Some companies are also offering free fitness trackers for cheaper insurance premiums, which allows them to assemble a full profile of your daily life.
Key Term Big Data
Originally defined by two NASA researchers, Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, big data referred to large data sets that computers could barely handle (Cox and Ellsworth, 1997).
Some years later, in 2001, Doug Laney published an article about the benefits of central data warehousing due to big data. In the article he coined the concept of the 3V for big data: Volume, Velocity and Variety. This was a great way to describe all aspects of big data as the breadth and depth of data increased (volume), the speed of data (velocity) had increased and different types (variety) of structured and unstructured data appeared (Laney, 2001).
Social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google gather big data. They have your personal profile details and can see your buying behaviour. This can be overlaid with additional data from third-party sources. This data is fed back to data specialists where the data is integrated, to better inform market research companies.
Two of the main professional data specialists are:
CACI, whose database named ‘Ocean’ provides lifestyle and demographic details on 48 million adults in the UK.
Nielsen, another major data specialist, which has amassed data on consumers in 47 countries.
These companies are invaluable resources when you are a busy marketing manager and want to target the right customers with the right message. As professional organisations, they abide by strict rules of conduct. However, there are less scrupulous firms selling data. Within five days of having my academic email address published on the university website, my data had been scraped (see Ethical Insights: Web Scraping) and sold on, which I realised as soon as I started receiving random emails from companies inviting me to attend health and safety conferences.
Ethical Insights Web Scraping
Web scraping or harvesting means taking data from websites without the owner's permission. It works by using web scraping software to visit websites, identify email addresses and add to a local database. The database is typically sold on as ‘new data’ and those making the purchase might think these companies have permission to sell the data!
Whilst web scraping is not technically illegal, using the data may be and often results in getting emails blocked and reported as spam.
The challenge with big data for consumers occurs when a company scrapes their data or uses their in-house data for other purposes, such as selling to third-party ‘partner organisations’ who advertise potentially unwanted products or adopt shady selling techniques.
1.7 Privacy and the Right to be Forgotten
There is specialist legislation, which is commonly referred to as ‘the right to be forgotten’, which enables individuals to remove unnecessary personal data from search engines.
Writing in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, researcher Kucuk Umit noted that collecting information that is ‘inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive’ contravenes the individual's right to be forgotten (Kucuk, 2016, p. 522).
However, as this is based on European Union legislation (May 2014 Court of Justice ruling) it can only be applied within EU states, which means that the information may remain in other locations, such as the United States. To discover how the process works, explore the search engines’ request forms for removal of content: Google https://is.gd/righttobe and Bing bing.com/webmaster/tools/eu-privacy-request.
Unsurprisingly, when a challenge occurs, solutions usually follow soon after. One solution, if you are unhappy with your online profile or if the search engines reject your request, is to gain third-party help to remove unwanted content, for a fee (see Digital Tool: Online reputation management).
Digital Tool Online Reputation Management
The right to be forgotten has created several new businesses, including online personal reputation management tools such as:
https://forget.me
Other legislation across Europe (including the UK) concerning data and privacy is the General Data Protection Regulation, which was introduced in 2018 and has changed how data is managed (see Key Term).
Key Term General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
The General Data Protection Regulation, abbreviated to GDPR, has introduced major changes in how data is managed. The Regulation means that organisations can only contact consumers if they have explicitly given consent, so if you have allowed a company to contact you about an online sale and they contact you about a totally different subject, the law is being broken. If organisations mis-manage the data and it is accidentally shared, leaked or hacked, the fines have increased dramatically. Maximum fines are 20 million euros or 4% of turnover, whichever is greater. This could result in smaller businesses ceasing to trade if their data is not properly secured and is shared.
You can find out more about the GDPR on these websites:
European Commission http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/index_en.htm
1.8 Bitcoin and Blockchain
In 2009 a new form of digital currency was introduced to the world, a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin.