My friend Rebecca needed a sleeper sofa for overnight guests. One morning, over coffee, she opened her laptop and started browsing. The sofa had to be compact enough to fit in a small alcove, but comfortable enough to accommodate a tallish guest. Finally, just as she found one she liked, she realized she needed to get going. She closed her laptop, gathered her things, and sped out the door.
Later that day Rebecca remembered the little red sleeper sofa and decided that it was the one she wanted. She pulled out her phone, went to the website, and bought it. When she got home, she opened her laptop and checked Facebook. There was the sofa. She went to another website: the sofa again. Emails came from the retailer: Want to buy a red sleeper sofa? The sofa arrived, took up residence in her loft, accommodated guest after guest, and still, the ads continued. For over a year.
One day Rebecca invited me to visit her in New York, “Why don’t you stay with me?” she asked. “You can sleep on the retargeting sofa.”
“The what sofa?!?” I blurted. And then she told me the story.
Retargeting is no joke
I would bet that the retailer has no idea that their little red sofa became a running joke for Rebecca and her circle of friends, although chances are they’re painfully aware of this problem. There was no way to reconcile “laptop Rebecca” and her purchases with “phone Rebecca” and her purchases.
Now consider what would happen if she used her personal email for one purchase and her work email for another; or used her mobile number in one place and her Google Voice number in another. Today we do this kind of thing all the time. What if someone then tried to use her credit card number and her shipping address to make fraudulent transactions, and the systems didn’t have access to all the right data to verify her identity? Not so funny anymore, is it?
One of the paradoxes of digital technology is that, even as we have access to unprecedented amounts of information, it has become harder and harder for businesses to know who we are and communicate effectively with us.
In its simplest form, these identity issues can be annoying, like having to repeat your name and address to multiple call center agents, or silly, like on a website today when I came face-to-face with ads for hair dye (umm, no thanks) and Super Mario stickers for my son (I browsed them on my laptop using Google Chrome, but my husband later bought them on our home desktop using Firefox).
Or it can feel creepy and intrusive, as when, several years ago, Target sent coupons for baby products to a young girl, correctly deducing from her shopping patterns that she was pregnant, but missing the fact that she was a teenager living at home with her parents, who did not know she was pregnant.
In its most extreme, “mistaken” identity can open the door to fraud, privacy violations or even legal action, if companies inadvertently call or text someone on the do-not-call list, or collect personally identifiable information (PII) from a minor, or market alcohol to someone who’s under the legal drinking age. The list of scary possibilities is long.
Whether they’re funny, annoying, vaguely disturbing or outright scary, these examples account for millions of dollars in wasted advertising and marketing budgets.
But there is another elephant in the room, and that is the question of privacy.
Privacy matters
What if we as consumers don’t want to be known? What if we want to opt out of sharing certain information? Or prohibit certain uses of our information? What if we decide to use ad blockers? Shouldn’t we be able to do that?
As we’ve seen in a long list of movies and TV shows, as long as we use apps on phones, tablets or computers, wear connected devices, or use the Internet, we are leaving digital traces of our presence everywhere we go, as surely as we leave our fingerprints on the things we touch.
In the digital world, no matter what tools we use, there is no reliable way to be completely anonymous.
This creates a bit of a paradox: To protect our privacy, companies have to verify who we are so they can instruct their systems on the proper and improper uses of our data, based on our expressed preferences. They have to build privacy into their systems from the outset. This is called privacy by design.
Of course, this sets an awfully high bar for the companies we do business with. If you promise me a relevant experience, don’t keep showing me Mario stickers well into 2016 (we may run out before then, but you get my point). And if you promise to respect my privacy preferences, you’d better deliver, and use the information I entrust to you carefully, ethically, and securely.
This means that we have to think about the relationship between digital identity and privacy a bit differently than we have in the past. This is especially urgent given the pace of change at which new technologies—wearable devices or virtual reality, for example—enter our lives. The world of data is getting faster and more complex every day, with more and more unintended consequences.
So, unless we keep our cash in our mattresses and live entirely off the grid (and even then!), the days of pure anonymity are over. As long as we inhabit the digital world, we have to come to terms with the fact that data is as much a part of our environment as the air we breathe.
But this shouldn’t mean that we are powerless, or that privacy is dead. If businesses want lasting relationships with us, they need to better understand who we are, what we’re looking for, and how and when we’re willing to share our data. Otherwise, they’re just a creepy ad or a retargeting sofa away from losing our business forever.
About the Author:
Susan Etlinger is an industry analyst with Altimeter Group, a Prophet company, where she promotes the smart, well-considered, and ethical use of data. She conducts independent research on these topics and advises global executives on data and analytics strategy. Etlinger is on the board of The Big Boulder Initiative, an industry organization dedicated to promoting the successful and ethical use of data. Find Susan on Twitter at @setlinger, or on her blog at susanetlinger.com.
