A few weeks ago I wrote about the NSTIC privacy conference. It was one of those events where a lot of ideas and concerns were discussed, which I always find helpful. Sometimes, however, you need to live some of these things to appreciate it. Here is a case in point .....
Yesterday I took two of my kids to have lunch in Baltimore. We all like the city and being a short drive away it is nice to swing by to see what is new and what is going on. We decided to grab lunch at a little pizza place just east of the main Inner Harbor area. When we got there I did a quick Yelp check-in and that got posted to my twitter feed. Three hours later I got a text from a Baltimore targeted Restaurant deal site's Twitter account. My conclusion is because of my Twitter post I was marketed directly for this service.
Now I am the first one to admit that Twitter, Yelp, etc are very open with limited privacy controls. But I had never been targeted so directly before. The fact that I had dined in a city I was now a market target. Do I have a right to let my friends know where I dine and if I enjoy it without the worry of being bombarded with service offerings? It is a simple case but I do see why the privacy groups are concerned with tracking of activities based around our identity.
How do we solve this? Of course there are those that are out there that will say - do not twitter all you do. But I am not sure that is a sane business model for someone like Yelp or for the businesses that rely on what is effectively word of mouth advertising. I will give kudos to the guys that developed the system to target market me but that being said I want control of what I am getting or seeing. I strongly believe that a combination of attribute release capabilities and opt-in/opt-out mechanisms need to be built into the provider systems so I can turn on or turn off these types of activities.
Hopefully NSTIC will drive the different parties to cooperate on an interoperable way to achieve this which I believe reduces risks for users and certainly makes them feel more confident about their privacy.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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