Open almost any digital service and something is competing for your attention. Click this. Watch this. Buy this. Read this next. Stay a little longer. Come back tomorrow. We have become so familiar with these prompts that they barely register anymore. But step back for a moment and there is an interesting question: Why does…
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Most organisations don’t set out to create surveillance systems. They set out to understand customers. What do people want? What are they interested in? What will they buy? What will make them stay? What will bring them back? Individually, each question sounds perfectly reasonable. But collectively they create something much larger. An economic incentive to…
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Think about an ordinary day online. You open an app and something has already been selected for you. You visit a website and something is recommended. You read an article and another one is waiting. You watch something and the next thing starts automatically. You browse a product and suddenly it seems to follow you…
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For decades, digital business has been moving in one direction. Know more about the customer. Collect more data. Build richer profiles. Observe more behaviour. Use that knowledge to predict what people might do next. The assumption is straightforward: The more an organisation knows about me, the more valuable I become. But there is another side…
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Think about how permissions work in everyday digital life. You download an app. You create an account. You accept the terms. You enable a feature. And somewhere along the way, a relatively simple decision becomes permission for an organisation to access, retain or connect far more information than you originally intended. We have become accustomed…
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Every organisation makes promises. We will protect your data. We will respect your privacy. We will only use your information for the purposes described. We will not share it without permission. We invest heavily in policies, governance, compliance and security to make those promises credible. And then we ask people to trust us. But there…
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We leave information behind almost everywhere we go online. Not necessarily because we deliberately provide it, but because our interactions themselves create information. When we connected. Where we connected from. What we interacted with. How often we returned. What happened before and afterwards. Individually these fragments can appear insignificant. Together, they can say a great…
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Think about how many organisations you interact with every day. Your bank. Your mobile provider. Your supermarket. Your streaming service. Your airline. Your social platforms. In the physical world, receiving a service does not always require the provider to understand everything about you. Yet digitally, visibility has become almost synonymous with service. We track interactions.…
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Think about the last time you tried a new digital service. Before you had experienced its value, you were probably asked for something. Your name. Your email address. Your date of birth. Perhaps your location, telephone number or payment details. Then came the terms and conditions, privacy notice, cookie choices and permissions. All before the…
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