Customer Data and Privacy: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

 

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UNINFORMED CONSENT

by Leslie K. John

The satirical website the Onion once ran an article with the headline “Woman Stalked Across 8 Websites by Obsessed Shoe Advertisement.” Everywhere she went online, this fictional consumer saw the same ad. “The creepiest part,” she says in the story, “is that it even seems to know my shoe size.” The piece poked fun at an increasingly common—if clumsy—digital marketing technique. But today its gentle humor seems almost quaint. Technology has advanced far beyond the browser cookies and retargeting that allow ads to follow us around the internet. Smartphones now track our physical location and proximity to other people—and, as researchers recently discovered, can even do so when we turn off location services. ...