The Facebook Fiasco - We Had it Coming

As a Marketing guy, I am ambivalent about the recent Facebook fiasco.

I hate to tell you: But, we had it coming.

Sure, I am outraged that 87 million people had their personal data accessed without permission, for corporate gains. But, the fact remains that the data existed within Facebook for it to be mined. If the data was legally accessed, it would have been fair game and we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Let’s not forget that the point of data mining and analytics is to gain advantage over the competition. They help sway decisions, opinions, and elections.

It’s not that complicated. We are all part of some data set.

The “Terms & Conditions” that we sign off, without fully reading, probably includes waivers that provide companies the right to the information that they gather.

All you have to do is take a look at our lives. We have been willingly signing away our privacy for a while now. I certainly have.

I have shared my likes and preferences with companies to help them serve me better. Or, so I believe.

And yet, I worry that my connected life may come back to bite me!

Here are a few examples.

My Fitbit knows that my sleeping habits are not ideal and that I am falling behind on my fitness routines. That info could be useful in the hands of a health service provider.

My Google Home wakes me up with an alarm and gives me a rundown of my schedule. It can see my calendar and knows the route I take to work. It gives me traffic information, recommendations, and reminders based on what it knows about me.

My presence is available to everyone who is in the same federated environment that I am in. Productivity and collaborative applications like Skype, Spark, and others know my status. The “find me follow me” feature on office communication systems plays big brother and sends my calls to wherever I am, whether I like it or not.

My phone knows every location that I have visited ever since I turned location services on. If you have a company phone, no more goofing off during work hours.

Facial recognition software and cameras deployed in a number of places ensure that I can be picked out of a crowd if ever the need arose. It will get worse. Some countries like China openly use the technology for law-enforcement. Other Governments will follow.

My smart TV, and Google Assistant listen and hear everything that I say around my apartment. I could hook up a camera to my TV, I have chosen not to. Being watched is a little bit more creepier than being eavesdropped.

My Roomba does more than clean my apartment. It maps and sends images of my apartment to the cloud. At some point, the floor-maps can potentially be sold to bidders like Amazon and Google.

Ridesharing services like Uber profile me based on the info I provide. When I order a pick up at a good hotel, or a destination that is in a nicer part of town, they charge me a higher rate than what they charge for a similar ride elsewhere.

My browsing is interrupted by Customer Service Reps with offers of assistance, encouraging me to chat with them or call them. They know what I have been specifically searching for.

Personalized advertisements target me. I search for squash shoes on Amazon and the next thing I know squash shoes suggestions pop up when I am searching for info on Artificial Intelligence.

My insurance company promises me discounts to install a telematics devicein my car that can track my good driving habits. You think they won’t use the insights to raise my premium if I break a few thresholds?

Retail stores track my movement inside and outside their stores to push promotions and other enticements for a share of my wallet. They know that I logged on to their Wi-Fi Access Point, the last time I was there. They can leverage my Bluetooth and/or mobile apps to further their product marketing goals.

I can go on and on…

After all information is power. And power is not worth much if you can’t cash in on it. As long as the information is legitimately gathered, it’s up to the owner of that data to decide how and when that power can be wielded.

The line between what is illegal and what is unethical is grey.

We haven’t even touched upon privacy infringing activities of employers and Governments. We will save that for another day.

For now, I continue to stay connected and leverage technology to make my life easier.

It’s a matter of trust. I hope it won’t come back to bite me.

A previous version of this post appeared on Medium.