Is Ethical Data Possible?

If you haven’t watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix yet, put it on your list. It will get you to think about the role of data in society and may cause you to take steps like stop or cut back on using social media, clear your tracking data, cookies and use more private browsers. For as many beneficial uses of data, and there are many, it has made us all targets that are easily manipulated for commercial or political gain. You may think you’re untouchable, that regardless of the data on you that has been harvested by others, you make independent decisions. Trust me and trust the data entrepreneurs featured in The Social Dilemma, you’re not.

I run a data company (we call it customer engagement) and I like to think that we have high ethical standards in its use. We don’t buy, sell or trade data. We ask people to follow our clients’ brands that they may be interested in. They have to decide to participate. We ask them to tell us their interests, needs, emotions and frustrations. They decide whether to tell us or not. We don’t harvest data from other sources, although our clients may have other data that they have gathered from transaction history. We use that, assuming it simply tracks purchases, dates and other demographic information to create customer profiles. We don’t target individual people for our clients’ marketing programs, but we do create segments of groups with common needs and interests and then tailor content to them. 

We know a lot about our clients’ customers that goes beyond demographic, psychographic and transactional data. We know their needs, interests, likes, dislikes, what influences or frustrates them and much more, often in their own words because we record and append their language to database files. We don’t sell advertising to anyone and our clients own their own data.

It’s powerful because we’re communicating back to people based on information they’ve provided when answering questions. It’s voluntary on their part and we follow GDPR and other privacy rules. Our belief is that we’re helping people receive only the information they say they’re interested in but we’re also helping our clients tailor marketing to their customers’ interests. Not much different than going into a store and engaging in a conversation with a sales person.  We believe it’s ethical use of data but still The Social Dilemma raised some questions. If you’ve seen it, we’d love to know what you think.

If you want to learn more about what we do, let’s set up a demo.