Chocolate Cubed

Over the last few days, the NY Times and the WSJ have been writing about Verizon Wireless’ talks with Google to have Google build a mobile search engine and operate all of Verizon’s mobile searches.  The talks started because Verizon couldn’t figure out how to create a single way to search from their phones.  In other words,  most Verizon phones make the customer use different search methods for each thing they are looking for.  So, if you want to search for a ring tone, you have one tool.  If you want to search for a game, there is another.  If you want an app, there is another.    Here comes Google to the rescue!   Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting at my client’s office discussing their different marketing campaigns and how they support each other.  During this conversation, the CEO used the phrase “Scientific Marketing” to describe how we were trying to analyze the different customer segments and market them more efficiently.   I immediately took note of the phrase and moved on, but I have been thinking about it since.  Is scientific marketing like marketing psychology? is it just another name for behavioral targeting?  should the privacy advocate in me be afraid of it?   Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo! announced on Thursday of last week that by the end of August everyone will have the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on their network.  For those of you who may not know what “customized” advertising is, it is their behavioral targeting and remarketing advertising options.  To put it another way, Yahoo!’s systems track you on their network and deduce what you are interested in buying.  For example, lets say Yahoo! figures out that you are interested in buying a car (you visited a lot of car sites) and then you visit the Wall Street Journal’s site.  Since WSJ has many ads on the site, it is fair to assume Yahoo! has access to at least one.  Now that Yahoo! knows you are looking for a car the system displays a car ad to you.  So in essence, what this new opt-out tool will stop the car ads from being displayed.  My problem is that although you can opt-out of seeing the ad, Yahoo! still knows it is you because you can’t opt out of being tracked in the first place.   Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, while reading the NY Times, I came across two articles that are somewhat related and started me thinking.  The first is titled “If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?” by Brad Stone.  In this essay Stone informs his readers about a site that was just unveiled last month: CriminalSearches.com. The site is owned by PeopleFinders and allows anyone to search public criminal records about anyone else.  All you need to know about the person is their first and last name.  This means you can look me up by just entering Jordan Salvit in the search and can see that I have no criminal offenses to my name.  As Stone points out in his blog post, “Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?“, people can easily judge their peers with access to this potentially incomplete information.  In his essay, Stone notes that if you have the records corrected they will be fixed immediately on the site.  So if you had a traffic violation removed from your record in Virginia it will no longer appear on CriminalSearches.com.  The problem is that nothing ever gets deleted from the internet.  Once content is posted on a site and then crawled by Google and cached in their system or by Archive.org someone can always find it.  After finishing the essay the privacy advocate in me was screaming to shut this site down.   Read the rest of this entry »