marketing
-
Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an Continue reading
-
Bulls-eyes
Tom Fishburne nails marketing bullshit across the ages. David Siegel on defining AGI: "I think a better definition is when a program is less wrong than most experts, and it admits there is much more to know. Continue reading
-
Friday, 20 June 2025
Convenient. The 50 Best Restaurants include: Six in Bangkok Five in Tokyo. Four in Paris. Four in Lima. Four in Copenhagen. Three in New York. Two in Munich. Two in London. Two in Mexico City . Two in Dubai. Two in Seoul. Two in Barcelona. One in Gardone Riviera. One in Alba. One in Singapore. Continue reading
-
Gnaws
And, not to be outdone, Bloomington. Here in Indiana, not far west of Columbus, is a stretch of highway 46 called Gnaw Bone. Says at that link that the origin of the name is “obscure.” By the way, Columbus isn’t the only Indiana location sharing its name with a bigger place elsewhere. • U.S. Cities: Continue reading
-
Don’t Buy This
Every so often a product shows up that is so bad somebody needs to sound a warning. So I’m sounding one for the Ion Retro Glow. For the last month or so, it’s been on display and selling at the Sams Club here in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s where I shot the photo above. At first I Continue reading
-
Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called Continue reading
-
We Need Whole News
Third in the News Commons series. Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.* Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include Continue reading
-
The most important standard in development today
Update on 31 October 2025: P7012 is now nicknamed MyTerms (much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi), and is on track for publication in January 2026. The standard is IEEE P7012: Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read Continue reading
-
Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following Continue reading
-
Time for advertising to call off the dogs
Digital advertising needs to sniff its own stench, instead of everybody’s digital butts. A sample of that stench is wafting through the interwebs from the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an ad industry bullphemism for yet another way to excuse the urge to keep tracking people against their wishes (and simple good manners) all over the Continue reading
-
So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. Sure, it’s hard to imagine that when we’re in the midst of the mania, but the end will come. When it Continue reading
-
Zoom’s new privacy policy
Yesterday (March 29), Zoom updated its privacy policy with a major rewrite. The new language is far more clear than what it replaced, and which had caused the concerns I detailed in my previous three posts: Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act, More on Zoom and privacy, and Helping Zoom Those concerns were shared Continue reading
-
Helping Zoom
[This is the third of four posts. The last of those, Zoom’s new privacy policy, visits the company’s positive response to input such as mine here. So you might want to start with that post (because it’s the latest) and look at the other three, including this one, after that.] I really don’t want to Continue reading
-
Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In Continue reading
-
The Spinner’s hack on journalism
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person. It works like this: You pay The Spinner* $29. For example, to urge a friend to Continue reading
-
On renting cars
I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now Continue reading
-
We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in Continue reading