Phone Firms Sell Data on Customers

[question everything]

Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers' locations, travels and Web-browsing habits. The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

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When a Verizon Wireless customer navigates to a website on her smartphone today, information about that website, her location and her demographic background may end up as a data point in a product called Precision Market Insights. The product, which Verizon launched in October 2012 after trial runs, offers businesses like malls, stadiums and billboard owners statistics about the activities and backgrounds of cellphone users in particular locations.

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The companies say they don't sell data about individuals but rather about groups of people. Privacy advocates say the law permits them to do so. In 2011, Verizon sent notice to customers saying they may use their data in this way.

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Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc., one of the world's biggest billboard companies, has agreed to conduct a trial of the Precision service, according to Suzanne Grimes, Clear Channel's North America president. She says the service could allow billboard owners to measure how likely someone driving by is to go to the store being advertised. "You've got an industry that was historically about eyeballs," she says. "Now you know more about who those people are and what their behavior looks like."

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SAP's offering will take an even broader approach... One possible use: Retailers worried about "showrooming," or inspecting products that the shopper will eventually buy online, can find out what websites people visit on their phones when they're in their stores.

More..

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/phone-firms-sell-data-customers-231300766.html

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Data on Customers

Title is kind of alarmist - i.e. - speaks Customer Proprietary Information (CPI). Not YOUR thread title per se . . . but Yahoo's.


Let me let you in on a little secret - our targets came from buying the same data from other companies.

The Verizon Wireless Coupe (senior target 65+ market launched in 2007) was not launched in a bubble. The data I pulled for the GTM right down to the quick start user guide came from web usage/gui/human factors info garnered from another company.


But there is a big difference between customer credit apps and general info about single never married no kids black women in upper middle class communities age 35 to 50.

[question everything]

2. Thank you for the explanation

I understand. I think that by now most people know that visiting web sites, sending emails is not private. That whatever one puts out can be accessed.

Personally, my phone is a simple pay as you go. I don't have either Facebook account nor Twitter. Just don't feel like exposing myself. But when people do and then complain, I have to ask them: what did you expect?

Similarly, I have never used company computers and phones for personal purpose for which I would have to later explain.