Ethics and Marketing Analytics: Just be Upfront

The new era of digital marketing has ushered in a fresh wave of customer privacy concerns. It has become to accepted norm for your activity online to be tracked by someone, somewhere – whether it’s the site you’re on, a site you visited weeks ago, or any number of third party tools and apps you’ve downloaded. I dare you to find a website privacy policy that doesn’t say it collects and tracks some type of customer data.

What Kinds of Data are Marketers Collecting?

In a post by Greg McConnell, he explores how Humana, a health insurance provider, scraped thousands of Match.com profiles of people who fit their target demographic. They compiled all of the text-based data, and were able to develop a more nuanced profile of their target market.

At face value this sounds, at the least, invasive. Using your online dating profile to better market health insurance – two areas of peoples’ lives that they would definitely rather keep private.

But is this really an invasion of privacy? The laws and policies that do exist prevent companies like Humana from collecting or compiling data in any way that can create personally identifying information. They’ll know your age, where you live, what your ideal first date would be, and what you’re looking for in a partner. But they won’t know that data is from you.

Transparency as a Solution

We know how companies are supposed to handle sensitive, personally identifying data. But we don’t know that they are actually following procedure. This can cause further anxiety for customers who are already concerned.

My recommendation to online businesses is to be more upfront about data collection than just sticking a clause inside your privacy policy. Make more of an effort to say what data is collected, exactly how you will and will not use it, and make that a promise to your customer. Data collection is ubiquitous, and the lack of transparency exacerbates things for both sides. Businesses now have a unique opportunity to stand out from their competition by highlighting something in their privacy policy that everyone else also has, but is just too afraid of the grey area to publicize.