I was delighted to be invited to take part in an online TV show run as part of Grant Leboff’s Sticky Marketing Club. With Grant and presenter Dave Harries we spent a very enjoyable time discussing trust in businesses and brands, how you build it, social media and how to create a trust to drive sales and profitability.

Please watch the show by clicking below.

The hot topic of the past week in the UK has been a piece of legislation proposed that would give access under warrant to the social media, Skype and other e-activity of anyone in the UK. What caused ire and general revulsion was the proposed collection of this information en mass about every citizen – “just in case” it was ever needed. This is a distinctly different approach to surveillance than has been practised before by the UK authorities.

What is clear is that in the battle for our freedoms against those that would take them from us we need the ability to monitor, disrupt and gather intelligence. Few, and certainly not us, would argue against this. The tension comes because the collection of data by the state on all it’s citizens breaks one of those freedoms that we so enjoy. As law abiding citizens we must be free to associate with whomever we want and to discuss anything we want and these rights should be assumed to be innocent unless there is evidence or real probable belief that wrong doing might be occurring. The ability for governments to snoop must continue to be a legally controlled and deliberate act based on just cause.

However it’s intriguing that whilst there are outcries when the government proposes to monitor what we do as law abiding citizens we accept that the mass collection of information about what we do, say and who we connect with is fair game for businesses to collect, retain and exploit. Your Internet browser is a fantastic way to understand what you are interested in, your mobile phone the best way to track where you are and your social networks can give a complete view of who you associate with.

Whilst regulation, especially the proposed EU Data Protection regulations gives citizens more rights over these data and initiatives like Privacy By Design encourage businesses and organisations to view people not as “users” but “data owners” the reality is that this collection of data about us largely goes on without transparency and without much control.

This should worry us all. We should be worried because we are only at the start of the digitalisation of our individual identities. The sheer pace of sensors and tracking being rolled out into equipment and software means that increasingly many elements of where we are, what we are doing and the environment around us will be collected and be available for companies to use. The stock defence rolled out by the advertising networks, Google, browser manufacturers and the like is that most of these data are anonymous which means that they are not linked to any personally identifiable information. This might be true but the leap to being able to link to an individual is extremely easy. At ALLOW with some nifty searching and use of current technologies we can get a huge amount of information on any individual and certainly enough to triangulate so that individuals could be identified from an anonymous data set.

It should also worry us because whereas as citizens we have, or at least should have, democratic control over government, we have very little control over corporations. Regulators both in Europe and the US are battling to establish consumer rights over information but they are under intense fire from the vested interests from companies who know that their value is intrinsically linked to the data they hold on all of us.

Many of the biggest corporations are now trying to evidence their commitment to resolving these issues, respond to individuals concerns and get ahead of the curve by embracing transparency. Both Google and Facebook now allow you to download, or “liberate” in Google’s case, your data from their systems. However this isn’t enough – allowing us to see the data is a smoke screen – it’s what they do with it that should concern us more. Currently the systems for controlling how companies use our information and for what purpose have not been written and goes to the heart of the quid pro quo that is the basis of the Internet. Essentially by using services you give your consent for them to collect, store and use your data to make money (mostly through advertising in the current paradigm) that’s why most can be free to the consumer.

Who we allow to hold and use our data and for what reward is the problem that needs to be resolved satisfactorily before the next wave of web benefit can be unlocked. Without a robust permission solution the impact on our society could be significant and whilst we are up in arms about the government snooping on us, we merrily continue down a path where our virtual identities are not our own but in the hands of large, mostly monopolistic companies.

Thanks for reading

Justin

This will feature in an up and coming blog entitled The Story of the Magnolia tree (and yes it’s a marketing blog)

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