Data and Security
I’m getting into data at the moment in a big way. It’s like a thought hit me that data is your eyes on the internet. Sure you can read the text and look at the images but its the data that tells you what is going on underneath.
Data security, capture and collection is a real fear. If someone has your data they can understand you. Be you. Without sounding like Assange or Snowden we have to keep harping on about this breach and that break cause it really is that serious. If you ever have your identity stolen it can really mess up your life.
There is an important distinction when you look at data between what I would call ‘safe’ data and the really dangerous stuff. Not all data about you is bad.
The key thing that a tech friend of mine explained to me is that data comes in two forms. Transactional and Aggregate.
Transactional
Transactional is what you and I would think of as data. Your NI number, postcode, date of birth obviously but it’s really anything that is about you. It’s your personal data.
It’s also anything that can be tied to you or something you do as an action that is tracked. Order something off Amazon, pay your gas bill, sign on at the dole. Every time that an occurrence of these events happens a transaction is recorded and somebody somewhere knows that you were involved.
Transactional data on the internet takes the form of logging. Most sites will log pretty much anything you do but because what you do is often instructed via a URL (via a GET request) and this is contained in the data request it is possible for anything listening in between you and the website to know what pages you are looking at. If it is not encrypted or obscured.
The difficult bit on the internet is knowing who actually made these requests. Main form of identification is usually an IP address and even then your ISP has to release that information. Not something difficult to get if you are law enforcement but awkward if you are just a guy sitting in his bedroom.
Most of us have to tell the site we are visiting who we are before they can properly track what we are doing. See if you can find a social platform that doesn’t ask you to login first, right?
Aggregate
Now an interesting thing happens to Transactional data when you add it together. It loses definition.
Say there are two guys who live in the same street, lets call them John and Jeff. Both John and Jeff are a bit bored with the Mrs and like to surf smut on the interweb at night. Now if you have John and Jeff’s transactional web data then you know this.
The moment you add them together you lose their identity. It has now become Aggregate data, a statistic. I can tell you that there are 2 guys in this street that are perverts. I just can’t tell you which ones. Might be teenage son from no 4 or the guy that lives with his mother in no 8.
Aggregate data is much safer than Transactional data. The moment you disconnect the person from the data it suddenly becomes abstract enough to lose the danger. The strange thing is that it actually makes the data more useful.
Conclusion
The online marketer should only ever really be interested in Aggregate data. Stay away from Transactional. Trying to understand an individual is generally a waste of time what we really need to be looking at is trends.
Now the good news if you are trying to work out what is going on is that because Aggregate is safe it is much easier to get hold of. Getting the number of people visiting a page or how many people retweeted that tweet are far more important than who those actual people are.
The main issue is getting data at the necessary level – split by region, category or keyword. If it is being transactionally tracked the number is probably out there. You just need to find someone who has aggregated it to a low enough level and is willing to give (or more likely) sell it you.
Data is power. It drives what you target. Aggregation is the key.