Marketers Hunger For Data From Wearables (readwrite.com) 82
An anonymous reader writes:Marketers would love to access information about your daily routines and your precise location, both data sets that would be trivially easy to extract from wearable devices. Those were the two most-requested items in a new survey of marketers, according to a new article at ReadWrite.com. "In the future the data procured from smartwatches might be much more valuable than what is currently available from laptop and mobile users," reports David Curry, raising the possibility that stores might someday use your past Google searches to alert you when they're selling a cheaper product.
That assumes. . . (Score:4, Informative)
. . .that you don't, for example. . . . forbid permissions for geolocation services. . .
I rather suspect that there will be a market for metadata evasion products, just like there are adware blockers now. . .
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Obummer and his cronies like Feinstein will probably try to outlaw that soon. Cause terrorists.
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Re: That assumes. . . (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget, it was Bush and his cronies that passed the Patriot act.
I'm not a supporter of Bush or Obama, but...
I'm inclined to be a little more pissed at Obama. Bush signed the original Patriot Act into law a little less than 7 weeks after 9-11. At that point in time, probably more than half of Americans would have been fine if it decreed all children will start military training at age 5. Damn few who voted even knew what all was in it. There were only 66 in the House who voted against it and only one in the Senate. And virtually all of the "leaders" of the democrat party voted for it. The dems had control of both houses for most (if not all) of the renewals of it under Bush. We already had somewhat of an idea of it's issues by then, yet it was still renewed by a democrat controlled congress.
Obama very much knew how bad it was. He told us during his campaign in 2008. Yet continued to renew it. Even after the Snowden leaks in 2013, the USA Freedom Act was passed in 2015, which renewed damn near the entire Patriot Act until 2019. The only real difference in that was that the phone companies kept the phone records rather than the NSA.
When it comes to the Patriot Act, you can count on most lawmakers in both parties to vote the same way. The only way they'll vote against it is if they think it might cost them their seat in congress.
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I'm not sure which is sadder; this lame attempt at trolling or the number of serious replies that it garnered.
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Along with almost all of Congress but I suppose you could consider the Democratic representatives and senators cronies as well.
Re:That assumes. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't get is that most 'wearables' don't have location sensors. A Fitbit or Vivofit may have accelerometers, but they have no GPS and no inertial guidance system. The Apple Watch gets its location data from its paired iPhone, which is already in frequent contact with a bunch of marketing companies; this is true regardless of the existence of a paired Apple Watch.
I assume these people are thinking there's some way to monetize heart-rate and/or motion data, but the attached article doesn't claim what that scheme might be. Maybe having an accelerated heartbeat in the presence of an iBeacon near a car dealer's display will tell the marketers which cars are perceived as most exciting, but any auto dealer or car salesman can tell that without needing a pulse check!
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Look's like there won't be a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for humans... The marketers will know both our location and what we are doing if they get their way...
What puzzles me as how they have any belief or even foundation of a belief that this kind of data will be accessible to them. Shouldn't the makers of these devices be being bent over backwards by the consumers to ensure that the consumers data is being kept secure? Oh, wait... companies like Polar have already convinced the masses that they sh
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I have no problem with marketers gaining my smart device exercise data. I merely charge $50,000 per bit.
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Don't these devices pair with mobile phones? I wouldn't know, because if a product has the word "fit" in the name, I avoid it like the plague.
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No sir, I'm not sticking any spiders up my but. Unh-uh.
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Again, guessing, but if the camera on a device can locate where the gaze is focused, and deltas in heart-rate and respiration are noted by the wearable, you'd have a metric on "impact" of a given ad or site.
And that would be solid gold to ad agencies. . .
Re:That assumes. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
1. You're assuming that 'forbidding permissions' for anything actually works, or can't be worked around somehow.
2. You're forgetting that the average person either has been brainwashed to not care about their privacy, or doesn't understand that their privacy is being violated in so many ways every single day, or they don't know how to restrict permissions for their very personal data (assuming, again, that even works at all).
So long as all these sorts of devices work with 'The Cloud', you'll never be 100% sure that your very personal data isn't being copied, leaked, or otherwise compromised. The only way that can happen, is if you use devices that don't connect to 'The Cloud' at all, and that you never, ever enter or upload data from such devices to the Internet, ever. Always assume that either by accident or by design, your personal data is getting into the hands of people and organizations that you don't want to have it.
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Do you trust that when you forbid permissions, you really forbid permissions?
Ain't gonna happen (Score:3)
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Ya, wouldn't that make the marketing companies subject to the HIPAA laws? All of a sudden maybe this doesn't look like such a great opportunity to them, if they can be sued into oblivion.
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Depends. If you go out an personally buy a Fitbit, any data collected is not covered under HIPAA. If you are given one by a hospital for them to collect data on you, it IS covered by HIPAA.
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Check the EULA, if you are agreeing to give them access to the the info the app provides, HIPAA no longer applies, because you gave them permission by agreeing to the ToS...
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You would have to pay me to wear any sort of smart device without a serious medical reason.
I'm afraid you hold a minority opposing viewpoint in a vast sea of people who already sell their health data in exchange for a discount on yogurt, or a "badge" they can post to Facebook. Try not to look at this from your personal perspective - try to see how the general population has embraced these devices. Then figure out how those people might react if you said "hey, if you run this heart-rate app while you take our car for a 5 minute test drive, we'll give you a $250 discount on any car in the lot!"
Yo
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Smart people will figure that the price has been padded by far more than $250, and negotiate based on that, not some phony discount.
I haven't noticed anyone using a fitbit or an apple watch or whatever - and you can be sure if they used them, they'd be letting the world know about it. Bragging rights ... same as nobody I know is demanding internet fridges or toasters or air conditioners or fridges. Even the ones with smart TVs just watch whatever's on cable or satellite. Samrtphones and tablets offer enoug
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I haven't noticed anyone using a fitbit or an apple watch or whatever - and you can be sure if they used them, they'd be letting the world know about it.
That reasoning is so circular, it has a circumference of 2*pi*r.
I have seen people with a fitbit on their wrist. No, they never mentioned it.
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Smart people will figure that the price has been padded by far more than $250, and negotiate based on that, not some phony discount.
Same problem: your perspective (or that of whatever you deem to be "smart people") isn't the perspective of the masses. The devices are indeed popular in some demographics, just not in yours.
I haven't noticed anyone using a fitbit or an apple watch or whatever
That's primarily because fitness trackers are mostly passive monitoring devices, not "things to use." Someone could be checking their steps on their smart phone but you wouldn't notice anything different from someone checking Facebook or reading texts. And Apple Watch is still an expensive luxury item; exact sales n
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They've been trying to sell internet fridges for a decade. They're not selling enough to see them on display in the big-box stores. Ditto with washers, dryers, ovens, and air conditioners.
For energy savings from ACs, it's easier to just use a timer or the on/off switch.
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There are definately Nests and Nest competitors in all the big-box home improvement stores. Also, WiFI doorbells and more.
A friend of mine even bought a WiFI enableld crockpot (that had no buttons for manual operation.) But, he got it on clearance, so, that's proably a wash.
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They've been trying to sell internet fridges for a decade. They're not selling enough to see them on display in the big-box stores. Ditto with washers, dryers, ovens, and air conditioners.
For energy savings from ACs, it's easier to just use a timer or the on/off switch.
Sorry to break the news to you, but I bought my WiFi equipped washer and dryer right off the sales floor, after having tested the connectivity and downloading the app to my smart phone. All four appliance stores I shopped at had different makes and models with connectivity. I ended up buying from a big box retailer anyway, as their offerings best matched my needs. But even the two smaller local retailers had devices with connectivity on display. (Hint: After installation, I discovered that Samsung's SmartH
Consumers don't hunger for wearables. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Glass, Apple Watch. The only successful wearable is the FitBit. However for the FitBit they buyers of it already fit a demographic so they wouldn't learn much more from that particular data.
Perhaps they need to focus on how to much such devices useful to the common person, before marketers can find ways to exploit it.
To what end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, marketing is already drowning in data. What good and useful information is this going to provide that the data they already have couldn't? What is the end product going to be and how will it be useful to anyone?
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You're operating under the assumption that they've thought that far ahead.
Remember when Radio Shack would ask for your phone number/email/whatever when you bought batteries? Or, well, anything, really. It was to collect data for marketing purposes, so they could send you advertisements and coupons and yes, turn around and sell that information to other companies.
But no one at Radio Shack really thought ahead to see that it was an asinine plan. Some marketing guy came up with the idea, and convinced a VP of
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We had a simple solution, don't shop at Radio Shack.
In the even we needed something we couldn't fins elsewhere, we'd lie through our teeth.
I notice a LOT fewer Radio Shack stores anymore. Wonder what the correlation might be?
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Hell, there's a strip mall nearby that has a Radio Shack sign, but it's not actually a Radio Shack any more. The store was too cheap to take the sign down when they left, and the people in the location now are too cheap to take the sign down now to remove any confusion.
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"Remember when Radio Shack would ask for your phone number/email/whatever when you bought batteries?"
"We had a simple solution, don't shop at Radio Shack."
Except that it eventually becomes more and more difficult to avoid technologies like this. You can still get away with "Don't get a smartphone" mostly (for phone app based invasions). "Don't get a car" (for auto-updates and on-star type stuff) isn't really practical for most people living in the US. How long will you cling to an old car that doesn't ha
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Different times.
Cyberpunk, where corporations are more powerful than governments , are fast becoming real.
(Neither corporations nor governments are proving to give a rat's ass about people's rights and their (the corp/government's) responsibilities...
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Seriously, marketing is already drowning in data.
Teach a student about the power of statistical analysis and they'll think everything can be exploited by statistics. Get a bunch of them drunk together and they assume that the common flaw in all of their models is non-representative sampling. The way to fix an unrepresentative sample is to get more data points from less willing participants.
It all flows logically from the questionable assumptions. The "end product" is a statistical model of each person accurate enough to manipulate you to spend more mon
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The "end product" is a statistical model of each person accurate enough to manipulate you to spend more money...
Let's say that's the idea. To get someone to spend more based on questionable mathematics and bad assumptions. Let's further say that it is successful. I've watched the stock market long enough to know that once someone has a new way to strip mine pennies, everyone else jumps on it so they're not left answering their bosses as to why they didn't make an extra dollar this quarter.
So now every marketing group has the same, ultimate "power of persuasion" which means either I'm broke and have no more money to s
BIG DATA will tell us all! (Score:2)
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Hari's shtick was all about the big movements that societies at large make. This is about individuals. AFAICT that part is still logically sound.
A better question to ask would be... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A better question to ask would be... (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question is how do they continue to make money this way? If I need a new pair of jeans or shoes I go somewhere try on a few pairs and buy the ones I like the best. I go to the store look at what they have and buy groceries. I have never seen and ad and thought I have to have one of those unless it was a brand new never before product and I'm not talking about just the next revision of a smart phone or new model car those are not new products.
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So the marketer data would tell stores that they have to win you over with advertising, not product companies. Which makes the ad more targetted towards you.
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What does that even mean? How would a store win me over with advertising if they didn't have a product I actually wanted?
A store or even a manufacture would get farther by having products I want, and in the end the majority of advertising I see are for things I wouldn't buy. It's almost as if they are dumping large amounts of money into advertising for products that don't sell in order to move things people neither need nor want. Which is an entirely other story since I frequently can't find products I want
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What does that mean? It means, you say "I don't pay attention to yogurt advertising, just go to the store and buy yogurt." Assuming this is true, and marketing people know it is true, you won't see more ads for brands of yogurt. But assuming you live somewhere with multiple stores that sell yogurt, each store will try to be the "the store" in your sentence.
They spend a lot of money advertising to a wide audience because they spend a lot of money advertising to their desired audience, plus whomever happen
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I don't live somewhere with a lot of stores otherwise I probably wouldn't be as annoyed because the list of things I can't find locally but will buy many times would probably be shorter.
Anything like current tracking (Score:2, Insightful)
stores might someday use your past Google searches to alert you when they're selling a cheaper product
Or, if it is anything like the current tracking, they'll alert me about the exact same item I just bought, frequently from the same store that I bought it from. I can't wait for this brave new advertising world.
that' why (Score:2)
I Hunger For Marketers Death (Score:2)
Marketers... (Score:2)
Marketers, worse than politicians and pedophiles combined....you be the judge
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No shit? (Score:2)
"Marketers would love to access information about your daily routines and your precise location..."
Yeah, no shit, Captain Obvious. Thanks for the news flash.
Whoever thought ... (Score:2)
Not just wearables.. (Score:2)
They are hungry for ALL the data to evolve into some bizarre creature drawn by Yoshitaka Amano.
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Kaneda? Is that you?
Who wants data from my smart watch ?!? (Score:1)
Yes (Score:2)
They certainly do [youtube.com].
Marketers Hunger For Data From Wearables... (Score:2)
Marketers would even implant anal probes in all cu (Score:2)
That does not mean they should be able to.