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Who Owns You?

I try to avoid using multiple social-networking apps at a time, but for people who just can’t help it, a tool that aggregates their multiple accounts might be useful, which is where Google’s OpenSocial platform comes in (if I understand it correctly). Whether it’s open enough at this time is rather another question. I appreciate the step in the right direction, and at the same time keep asking: how about our lives [data, processes] outside the social networks?

MySpace is fun if you have the time for it. So is Facebook. Chances are, however, that you only keep a fraction of your time, energy, and money there. Most of your interactions are conducted elsewhere.

Even if we stay in the online sphere, there’s so much going on that stays outside social networks. We shop for stuff, email each other, download music, chat & kill time. We leave traces and artifacts that are owned by the proprietors of the services we’ve used.

CRM has addressed the need of businesses to execute, aggregate, mine, and exploit their interactions with customers. VRM is, if I am reading this right, researching ways to balance the relationships we have with organizations so that we have more control.

The problem is, organizations have resources to build and maintain the infrastructure where those interactions take place; individuals don’t. And they mostly don’t care, either; it’s the organization’s responsibility to ensure the interaction (and transaction) completes successfully with only the absolutely required inputs from the individual.

Whoever does care, however, doesn’t have an easy way of accessing, let alone claiming ownership of, the information various parties keep about him or her. There’s no way of telling Amazon, tell me all you know about me, then forget it. They, too, are a party to our relationship, and have similar right to the information produced since we begun doing business.

Europe has regulations as to what personal data businesses can keep with and without consent from their customers. There’s much of soft data, however, that aren’t subject to these regulations. Successful CRM implementations have enabled some to gain a meaningful insight into the customer’s behavior and preferences. With or without the customer’s consent.

I believe there has to be a discussion about the rights of ownership to such data. At the very minimum, businesses should be required to tell you what they know and think of you. Declined credit? Instead of a vague rejection letter, you should get a detailed report stating what criteria you’ve failed and why; what risks are perceived as to your future behavior.

This isn’t about the internet, Web 2.0 or 3.0. Forget it. We’re talking real world, real relationships, stuff that involves our everyday lives. The internet has helped to equalize some of the relationships we have, very much with the media, the government, and each other, and the debate should now switch from the virtual to the actual. We don’t go to bed and neither do we wake up as avatars.

November 13, 2007 | Filed Under CRM 

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