Ford Exec: ‘We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law’ Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car – Business Insider

Ford Exec: ‘We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law’ Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car – Business Insider.

While Ford’s VP of Global Marketing and Sales has since tried to retract his statements, it is fairly obvious that his original assertion that “[Ford] know[s] everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”  is, in fact, spot-on the truth. While Ford may not be currently doing nefarious things with the data is collects from the GPS devices is it now installing in all of its vehicles, it does highlight the fact that companies that create products we buy and own are now collecting data on us over which we, as consumers, have zero control or ownership.

Data collection of this scope and nature raises huge privacy concerns, and certainly offers even further potential in-roads for the government to collect surveillance data on individuals. As you may be aware, recent court decisions have held that law enforcement cannot palce GPS trackers on automobiles without first obtaining a warrant from a court to do so. With the collection of this kind of data by car companies such as Ford, there is now no deed for law enforcement to obtain a warrant to track a suspect. They can simply demand the records maintained by Ford, for which, based on current case law, there is no requirement for a warrant.

While I am neither a Luddite decrying the dangers of technology, nor a paranoiac assuming that either the Governement or “Big Business” are out to get us, this sort of widespread and pervasive data collection clearly points out the need for a robust public debate over the meaning and boundaries of privacy in the digital age. While there is immense good (economic, social, and otherwise) that we can do with all the data we are now capable of (and are in fact) collecting and analyzing, there comes with it significant dangers of destroying personal privacy altogether and eroding the civil rights accorded to U.S. citizens under the U.S. Constitution.

While this debate had begun to come to the forefront of many people’s consciousness with the revelations of the activities of the NSA by Snowden, it is increasingly clear that the definition of privacy and privacy rights of individuals (and even businesses) is something that requires wide ranging thought, analysis, robust public debate, and in the end decisive legal action. Both our economy and our personal freedoms depend the outcome of the process. We cannot simply afford to sit by and “see what happens”. The statekes are far to great.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1#ixzz2q0Y51SBy

Marketing Meets Big Data

This is a nice overview of the evolution of the role of marketing in social media era. Increasingly, Big Data will play a role in effective strategies and understanding the marketplace. This may not be new, but it is certainly an accelerating trend.

Gigaom

Depending on what research you believe, chief marketing officers are either more powerful than they’ve ever been — or they’re on their way out.

Early this year,a Gartner(s it) analyst predicted that CMOs will have bigger IT budget power than CIOs by 2017. Naturally, that analysis was quickly bandied about by CMOs.

But last week, in a blog post unambiguously titled “Marketing is Dead,” Bill Lee wrote that CMOs, as a species, are under fire.

Lee, president of the Lee Consulting Group which focuses on “customer engagement,” cited data from a 2011 Fournaise Marketing Group study suggesting that CEOs don’t see ROI on marketing efforts and are sick of being asked for marketing money with no discernible payoff. On top of that,  Lee posits that shoppers don’t pay attention to traditional marketing anymore. Ouch.

Cloud and big data reshape the marketing role

Underlying this seeming contradiction is that marketing is…

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Big data and the changing economics of privacy — paidContent

Big data and the changing economics of privacy — paidContent.

The blog paidConent recently ran an interesting piece on the economics of preserving privacy in a world of Big Data. The reality is that information is gathered about individuals from a tremendous number of sources (credit card bills, online shopping sites, public records, etc.), much of which is bought and sold in volume for relatively tiny prices. Data aggregators can then take this information (along with records on millions of other individuals) and monetize this by selling access to it to any number of sources (from retailers, to debt collectors, an so forth).

Stopping this outbound flow of information, however, requires either considerable effort or considerable cost (or both). In the absence of meaningful legislation or industry policy on “do not collect” and/or “do not tract” the process of preserving privacy is increasingly difficult to achieve. The time has come to give greater attention to the implications of this ever eroding base of privacy and how, as a society, we want to deal with it. Legislation/regulation? Voluntary industry restraint? Surrender to the inevitability that there may/will be no privacy in the future? The best solution is far from obvious, but we are will overdue to begin the conversation in earnest.