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Marketers Hunger For Data From Wearables (readwrite.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Marketers would love to access information about your daily routines and your precise location, both data sets that would be trivially easy to extract from wearable devices. Those were the two most-requested items in a new survey of marketers, according to a new article at ReadWrite.com. "In the future the data procured from smartwatches might be much more valuable than what is currently available from laptop and mobile users," reports David Curry, raising the possibility that stores might someday use your past Google searches to alert you when they're selling a cheaper product.
Google Glass, Apple Watch. The only successful wearable is the FitBit. However for the FitBit they buyers of it already fit a demographic so they wouldn't learn much more from that particular data.
Perhaps they need to focus on how to much such devices useful to the common person, before marketers can find ways to exploit it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seriously, marketing is already drowning in data. What good and useful information is this going to provide that the data they already have couldn't? What is the end product going to be and how will it be useful to anyone?
What I don't get is that most 'wearables' don't have location sensors. A Fitbit or Vivofit may have accelerometers, but they have no GPS and no inertial guidance system. The Apple Watch gets its location data from its paired iPhone, which is already in frequent contact with a bunch of marketing companies; this is true regardless of the existence of a paired Apple Watch.
I assume these people are thinking there's some way to monetize heart-rate and/or motion data, but the attached article doesn't claim what that scheme might be. Maybe having an accelerated heartbeat in the presence of an iBeacon near a car dealer's display will tell the marketers which cars are perceived as most exciting, but any auto dealer or car salesman can tell that without needing a pulse check!
John
The real question is how do they continue to make money this way? If I need a new pair of jeans or shoes I go somewhere try on a few pairs and buy the ones I like the best. I go to the store look at what they have and buy groceries. I have never seen and ad and thought I have to have one of those unless it was a brand new never before product and I'm not talking about just the next revision of a smart phone or new model car those are not new products.
Don't forget, it was Bush and his cronies that passed the Patriot act.
I'm not a supporter of Bush or Obama, but...
I'm inclined to be a little more pissed at Obama. Bush signed the original Patriot Act into law a little less than 7 weeks after 9-11. At that point in time, probably more than half of Americans would have been fine if it decreed all children will start military training at age 5. Damn few who voted even knew what all was in it. There were only 66 in the House who voted against it and only one in the Senate. And virtually all of the "leaders" of the democrat party voted for it. The dems had control of both houses for most (if not all) of the renewals of it under Bush. We already had somewhat of an idea of it's issues by then, yet it was still renewed by a democrat controlled congress.
Obama very much knew how bad it was. He told us during his campaign in 2008. Yet continued to renew it. Even after the Snowden leaks in 2013, the USA Freedom Act was passed in 2015, which renewed damn near the entire Patriot Act until 2019. The only real difference in that was that the phone companies kept the phone records rather than the NSA.
When it comes to the Patriot Act, you can count on most lawmakers in both parties to vote the same way. The only way they'll vote against it is if they think it might cost them their seat in congress.
Here's a couple points for you to consider, friend:
1. You're assuming that 'forbidding permissions' for anything actually works, or can't be worked around somehow.
2. You're forgetting that the average person either has been brainwashed to not care about their privacy, or doesn't understand that their privacy is being violated in so many ways every single day, or they don't know how to restrict permissions for their very personal data (assuming, again, that even works at all).
So long as all these sorts of devices work with 'The Cloud', you'll never be 100% sure that your very personal data isn't being copied, leaked, or otherwise compromised. The only way that can happen, is if you use devices that don't connect to 'The Cloud' at all, and that you never, ever enter or upload data from such devices to the Internet, ever. Always assume that either by accident or by design, your personal data is getting into the hands of people and organizations that you don't want to have it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!