In the past several weeks I have seen ads on TV, and gotten a lot of mail telling me that the US census is happening and that it’s against the law to not participate. My first reaction was to wonder how massive the budget is for this in a recession, then I wondered why they can’t use data from sources like the Internal Revenue Service (it’s also illegal not to file tax returns and people know that). But the bigger issue in the year 2010 is that for at least the last five years, and maybe ten now, we have been inundated with information about the importance of maintaining privacy about our information, and that we need to “get” something in return for “giving” information. So asking us to give information to the not-so-trusted government? Back in the 20th century people had a very different sense of privacy (and duty to country), and I am not surprised people willingly, trustingly, provided this information.
Like it or not, that is the current culture and I really don’t see the US census people liking the results they are going to get. It’s not really very different from the manufacturers that have been trying to get information about us since the beginning of mass market retail, and until very recently they had next to nothing.
Over two years ago, Louise Story wrote this super piece in The New York Times explaining that the people who sell us the things that we buy have really crummy information about exactly who is buying it, and which of their advertising efforts cause us to buy. All they really need is basic demographic data, age, gender, geography, means, that sort of thing. They don’t care what my name is, which is what alice.com has figured out (I blogged about alice.com recently) and alice.com has a brilliant model for collecting (and selling) that prized information.
Today there was this interesting article in the paper by Stephanie Rosenbloom talking about how stores are using various methods to film customers in their stores to watch behaviors and make adjustments where appropriate – so if for example, they see several people having a hard time reaching a specific product, they figure out how to make it easier to reach. My bet is that if you speed up the film a bit, you could watch the flow of traffic like a river and see where the jams are, not really having to pay much attention to any one person (for that objective). They mention a company called Envirosell that is apparently the real trailblazer in helping organizations do this. There was some reference to this being an invasion of privacy and that in the not-too-distant future they will have face recognition software to know who we are, but the stores don’t care what our names are in mass market selling – they just want the same demographic data that alice.com is collecting online.
The US government needs to treat us like a customer if they want information from us, and they should take a look at “how” smart companies collect information about their mass market customers. Welcome to the 21st century and welcome to the “how” trap that I talk about in the pages of the book Rethink.
-Ric
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