“You have zero privacy anyway; get over it,” said Scott McNealy, of Sun Microsystems in 1999. Tactful, no. But is he correct? Unfortunately, yes. And privacy advocates need to understand this. As a consumer, every time you buy an item, whether it has an RFID tag or not, you give companies a wealth of information about you. But the technology used to gather information, such as RFID tags (and credit cards), is not the problem.
At a recent conference on Business Intelligence (BI), a new buzz- word to describe the tools that will help executives predict consumer behavior, executives from Pizza Hut spoke on how they use BI tools and how these tools have significantly boosted their sales revenue. The technology used to gather these data for the BI tools wasn’t RFID, bar codes, or anything particularly sophisticated — it was the telephone.
Pizza Hut has more than 20 years worth of data on consumers — more than 40 million U.S. households. You give the company all kinds of information every time you order a pizza for delivery. All you have to do is give the order taker your phone number and he calls up your order history on a computer. Chances are the order taker asks if you’d like the same type of pizza you ordered last time, which means you spend less time on the phone describing your wants, and you may get your pizza faster. All of which translates into better customer service.
In fact, one of the reasons behind gathering all these data is better customer service. Would you like to be informed of alternate routes in your travels to avoid traffic accidents and congestion? Or would you like to be notified, while you’re driving, of the lowest gas prices along your route? Probably yes to both questions. To provide these services, companies have to collect data on you.
Pizza Hut knows what kind of pizza you order, how often, what coupons you use or don’t use, and how much you spend in a given time period. Marketing managers now take this information and run it through a BI system that predicts and forecasts the probability of your next order. They then use this information to determine marketing strategies to influence you to buy more pizza without spending more on that marketing program than they have to. The new BI tools enabled Pizza Hut to recoup its investment in three months.
The point is that RFID is not the enemy. Nor are other data-gathering technologies, like the telephone and the electronic product codes (EPC) that Consumers Against Shopping Privacy Invasion and Numbering founder Katherine Albrecht claims. In a recent article in USA Today, she claimed that EPC systems are as dangerous to humanity as nuclear weapons. That’s a bit of an overstatement.
However, data will be collected and collated on us whether we like it or not. The recent Teradata conference confirms this. Data will be analyzed by these new BI programs, because this gives executives something tangible to use to justify their decisions.
The real issue here is business ethics, a subject that is different from business intelligence.
Will business ethics play a part in any data analyses? Technology gives us the ability to analyze data in just about any way executives want. Should we analyze data in some ways, however? The “should we” aspect is the one that’s often ignored and the real issue that privacy groups should focus on.
We have reached a new frontier. Businesses have never had the power they soon will have to affect people. If businesses choose not to behave ethically, then an angry (thanks to Enron and others), not always technically sophisticated public will shut down legitimate uses of technology, which in the end will negatively affect the bottom line. Regulations will only be the beginning.
Leslie Langnau, contributing editor
