Archive for the 'Marketing' Category

Spock Scares Me

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

I’m pretty profligate online. Life as a gadfly means you live a public life, writing about stuff and having people talk about you and what you write. I’ve just had my first scary experience online; it was being invited into Spock. The reason it’s scary: You must give up your online credentials to other social networks before you know anything about Spock other than their privacy policy (which really should be called a “publicity policy”) and their about page, in which they refer to the people who started the company as “our wicked team” (a truly re-assuring description).

The truth? This is a company that is designed to find and assemble information about me for its own purposes, without regard to my desires or beliefs about my information. Spock is proud that I can claim any of the 13 profiles it has listed when I search on “Stewart Alsop”. But I can only claim those profiles if I give up my user name and password for the site where the data came from. One of those profiles is for my father, who died 33 years ago; it has a photo of me attached to it. One of those profiles is for my son, who is 22 and has robust information on MySpace and Facebook (apparently MySpace is easy to capture; Facebook is not). One of those profiles is for the other Stewart Alsop, a young fellow in the UK who I met through Facebook and seems to hail from the same family roots. All 10 of the other profiles are about me (as far as I can tell).

I don’t trust Spock. The first story I read about the company was about how some people were discovering that Spock was harvesting material that had been intended as humorous or as pranks and presenting it seriously, so that people were being tagged publicly, for instance, as pedophiles. (I assume that Spock’s option called “Adult tags settings” is a result of that story.)

When I was invited into Spock, I read the privacy policy pretty carefully: It says that “Spock does not crawl, mine, search, or index password protected websites.” If that’s true, then why does Spock need you to give up your credentials for sites that require a password. MySpace, for instance, definitely requires a password for me to log in, but it appears to be the source for much of the data Spock has. (And when I used my MySpace URL to try to claim that data, Spock reacted by saying that was not a legitimate web site.) That the privacy policy is so unclear about the use of password-protected material does not increase my trust in Spock.

The bottom line on the privacy policy is that it is very carefully written to make you have ALL the liability for any “publicly identifiable” information. In other words, if Spock can find data about you, they treat it as public and they do what they want with it. You can’t correct the data at Spock; you need to go back to the source, correct it and then ask Spock to update it. This is a privacy policy written by a company whose every intent is to harvest personal information about you and then use it as the basis for their business. Indeed, because it is a venture backed business, it is not inaccurate to say that everyone who works for Spock is hoping to get rich from using your personal information. This is much, much worse than the credit rating services or even other, similar businesses like Rapleaf.

This service scares me. I am not going to make it any easier for the “wicked team” to verify my information or sort out those profiles. I have no interest in providing my credentials to the company. (I wonder how they propose to get my father to come back from the dead to claim his profile.)

The worst thing (from the point of view of a died in the wool venture capitalist)?: It feels like the company hasn’t matched up the technology with their business and marketing objective. If they had started with a good attitude toward tending to and protecting and managing my personal data, it would have been relatively easy to get started on a positive, rather than hostile relationship with me as a user. I’m profligate; how much harder will it be for the company to establish any kind of trust with people who really care about their privacy? How bad can a company’s marketing be that they treat harvesting personal information as a purely technical challenge?

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No Mo Music From iTunes Music Store

Sunday, November 26th, 2006
I’m not buying music from the iTunes Music Store anymore. This is a specific outcome from being a director (independent; Alsop Louie Partners is not an investor) of Sonos Inc. Sonos makes a very cool and increasingly popular system for distributing music around your house and playing different music in each room. I won’t make an ad for the system here. (I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t suggest that it is an excellent Christmas gift for the well-off computer geek who loves to listen to music.) But the one relevant aspect is that Sonos cannot play music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.That’s because that music is protected by Apple’s so-called “Fairplay” digital rights management (DRM) technology. Unfortunately, Apple won’t license Fairplay. So Sonos can’t get from Apple what it needs to be able to play tracks purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Sonos, of course, does not promote the acquisition of music illegally and is perfectly willing to pay reasonable licensing costs to use other companies’ technology to be able to play music legally. But Apple just isn’t willing to license the technology.  
 

Once I realized that about 20% of my music database is out of the reach of my Sonos system, I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store. I still use the iTunes Store for other media; for instance, I recently bought the episode of “Lost” where Ecko was killed, since my TiVo had mysteriously missed recording that episode. But I don’t buy music from the store; instead I borrow copies of the same music I already paid for from other users using the Acquisition peer-to-peer sharing system for the Macintosh. I already paid for these titles and am perfectly within my rights to have copies that do work on my system. (I won’t go into how I also use Acquisition to try out new musicians before deciding to actually buy their CD.)

But here’s the real point I’m wanting to get to: Since I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store, I’ve also noticed that I am using my iPod a lot less. I listen to music in my car; I’ve gotten sick of trying to make the radio interface for my iPod work and have just defaulted to listening to the radio. (I hate it but that’s a separate post.) I listen to music on airplanes; I’ve realized that it’s much easier to plug my Bose headphones into my computer and listen to iTunes rather than the iPod, since I always have my computer open on the airplane. I listen to music sitting in my living room; and I’ve taken to listening to music on Sonos at home.

The real point: I’m not using my iPod nearly as much as when it first came out, when Fairplay hadn’t been deployed, when Sonos hadn’t been invented and when I had a car with a tape-play instead of a CD (for the iPod interface). I’m using my iPod about 20% of the time I used to, but I’m not missing it at all. More than 70 million units later, maybe the iPod does have an end of life. Hmmm….

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