Tag Archives: Data mining

April 5, 2019 · 2:21 pm

What Kind Of Cold Cut Are You?

It’s Foodie Friday, which means that the weekend is upon us. Maybe you’ll use the downtime to catch up on your reading or non-work web activity. I’ll bet you might even fall into the trap of taking one of those online quizzes.

If you go on a site like Buzzfeed, you won’t have to read very far before you’ll encounter a food-related quiz of some sort. “We’ll Guess Your Exact Age If You Take This French Fry Quiz” or “Your Subway Order Will Determine Where You Should Live.” By the way. according to them, I’m a 23-year-old who should be living in Seattle…

Food quizzes and others are all meant to be good fun, or are they? When Facebook asks me what Harry Potter character I am, don’t I really want to know? Actually, no, I don’t. Let’s think about the “innocuous” quizzes cited above. Asking me about my preferences in fry style, favorite fast-food fry outlet or condiment provides a great deal of information both in the aggregate and about me personally when it comes to targeting me with ads. How can they do that when they don’t know who I am since I didn’t log in? Well, I really did sort of log in since both the Facebook pixel and Twitter pixels are active on the site. They can sell the aggregated information to producers of fries and condiments and fast food chains and they can sell my “pixel” to advertisers of the same.

Then there are the quizzes that ask you to give them an email to send you the results. They’re even more dangerous, as are the quizzes that ask you to answer questions that might be used as security questions (Where did you go to middle school or what was your first car?). We need to understand that since we’re living in the age of surveillance capitalism, everything we do is worth something to someone other than ourselves. Since we don’t have any control much of the time over who is collecting – and selling – our data, we need to be especially wary of every action we take. A “like” is a vote, a “share” is an endorsement. If you don’t believe me, go to your Facebook ad settings and check out what they think your interests and other tidbits are.

What kind of cold cut are you? The kind that gets sliced quite thinly and sold by the pound. Forewarned is forearmed!

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March 29, 2019 · 10:38 am

You Want Anonymity With That?

It’s Foodie Friday and today we have yet another example of how privacy is dead, this time from the food world. OK, I might be a little paranoid here but I think I can see the future in how McDonald’s sees the future and it scares me. Let me explain and then you can weigh in on my thinking.

What Mickey D has done is buy an Artifical Intelligence company. They intend to use the AI to adjust the menu in the drive-through as you pull up. The thinking is that these adjustments will cause you to buy more. You know – promoting cold drinks on hot days or suggesting items that are faster to prepare if the kitchen is in the weeds to keep food orders flowing. It gets scary when the menu changes as you order, suggesting sides after you order your burger.

Now you may see nothing wrong with this. After all, Amazon does this all the time. So does Netflix, suggesting things to you that you should find of interest based on your past behavior. That’s not scary until McDonald’s installs license plate readers and begins associating your food order with your vehicle. Of course, it’s also possible that they could obtain a listing of every device that was in their drive-through. By the hour. Cross-reference that to available phone directories and automobile registrations and NOW how do you feel?

It’s yet another step down the road to full surveillance capitalism, at least in my paranoid mind. There are benefits, no doubt, to McDonald’s, and I’m sure they will be followed by others (maybe even others buying their systems from McDonald’s AI company). Do you really think there are benefits to us, however? I think trust and privacy are going to become even bigger issues for consumers and regulators over the next 12 months and if you’re not thinking that way, you just might be making a mistake.

What happens when Mickey D sells their frequency of use data to the insurance company who then raises your rates because you eat fast food all the time? Sure, when you roll into The Golden Arches while you’re 250 miles from home, it might be nice that they already know what you’d like, but I’d rather have anonymity. You?

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January 17, 2018 · 1:50 pm

Snowing Our Ignorance

It’s snowing here in Central North Carolina. Again. Is that unusual? Well, the area usually gets less than 6 inches of snow a year and we’re about to get 4 or so. We also got a few inches several weeks ago. When we got a dusting (and to my Yankee friends I know that 6 inches are pretty much just a dusting) of snow last year – maybe half an inch – the area came to a complete halt and schools were shut for 4 days. You can imagine what 4 inches will do. Fortunately, by the weekend it will be near 70 degrees so the accumulation shouldn’t be around very long.

Photo by Catherine Zaidova

Other than venting about the golf courses being covered in white, why do I bring this up? Because it’s symptomatic of something which has business implications. Increased snowfall, extreme temperature changes, and other weather phenomena are indicative of something going on. It’s pretty clear that something has changed and yet there are those who turn a scientific and factual issue into a political one. Folks, you can call it climate change or you can call it Fred but no matter what you call it, it is real.

You know, of course, that we don’t do politics here on the screed and my point isn’t that we need to acknowledge that the weird weather everywhere is the result of climate change. The point is that any businessperson can give their own interpretation about what they see going on in the market and in their own enterprise. The problem is that sometimes their interpretation conflicts with the empirical evidence – the facts. A single data point isn’t a reason to change your entire strategy, but when you have enough data points to produce a reliable trend, attention must be paid.

There are some very famous studies that were conducted by Stanford in 1975. They showed how people’s opinions are often unmoved by facts. One need not go a heck of a lot further than your own Facebook feed to see one person trying to change another’s mind using some fact-based evidence and failing miserably. The cold weather and snow here remind me that you can deny the facts but that denial won’t keep the snow from falling. Question the sources of information, question the interpretation of information, but once those questions are answered, don’t deny the facts. You still will have to shovel up the aftermath regardless. Make sense?

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Filed under Reality checks, Thinking Aloud, What's Going On

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