COMMENTARY--Technology can be tricky... it can even be sneaky, but in the end, we better see some benefit!
You know, with all the spyware and trackers and ad monitors supposedly keeping tabs on my surfing habits, I'm amazed at how little marketers know about me. If it's as bad as so many people think it is (and the growing anti-spam movement is certainly calling quite a bit of attention to the subject), who is really collecting all this information? And what are they doing with it?
I have to say that the whole situation never concerned me much--cookies were (and still are) pretty much harmless bits of information that anyone is welcome to as long as those cookies continue to help me with my online purchases and enable my favourite Web sites to welcome me by name.
If advertisers team up with media monitors to try to get a fix on what I'm interested in, I'm all for that, but--as I said before--if the spam I receive is anything to go by they're not doing a very good job of putting that information to work.
In a perverse sort of way, though, I'm intrigued at the many ways technology is being used to get at our seemingly all-important needs and habits.
Spyware, however, is a bit of a different story. Using the definition that spyware is software that transmits information back to a third party without notifying the user, at the very least I'm disturbed that my bandwidth is being used for someone else's benefit without my knowledge.
And recent stories in the news seem to indicate that it's going to get worse.
Many organisations are now embedding minute Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transponders into their products, including fashion label Benetton which is said to be weaving sophisticated tracking technology into some of its clothing.
| If you really want to let the paranoia take hold, all you have to do is realise that clothing is not the only thing marketers can use to identify and track us. |
According to Mark Sneddon, the national co-ordinator of the privacy practice at leading law firm Clayton Utz, practices such as these expose "holes in existing Australian privacy legislation."
Sneddon goes on to say, "Not only can information about you be collected from an RFID as you walk through a shop or down the street, this technology makes it theoretically possible for information about an individual's possessions to be collected at work, in a cinema, at a sporting event or on public transport."
And if you really want to let the paranoia take hold, all you have to do is realise that clothing is not the only thing marketers can use to identify and track us. Mobile telephones are able to identify themselves and broadcast their locations.
A current court case is showing another way in which mobile phones can be used to grab customers, especially those with fat fingers.
In the US, AT&T has filed a lawsuit contending that Sprint and two other rival telephone companies are "stealing calls from AT&T toll-free operators" through what is called a "fat-finger dialling" scheme.
Basically, AT&T is accusing those named in the suit of snapping up all the toll-free numbers near to AT&T's (1-800 CAAL ATT, for example) so that they can grab some new business.
To see what fat fingers mean when typing on the keyboard, enter www.goggle.com and see what happens.
There's no doubt that sneakiness worries a lot of people in our business. This was one of the things we discovered in the recent focus groups we held regarding Technology & Business.
Even though we have long prided ourselves on the fact that we use independent test labs for our product reviews, there seem to be readers that still seem to think that reviews are "paid for", or that vendors can "buy" their way into reviews.
The testing is indeed paid for--by the magazine. We set the criteria for the products to be submitted to each review, and any vendor who can supply a product that meets those criteria is welcome to send it to the labs (the vendors pay only for the shipping to and from the labs).
If you have any further questions on how we test, please send them to edit@zdnet.com.au
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