I am not a patient – stop monitoring me – on listening platforms and behavioral targeting

I am a potential or at best a customer, not a patient  in need of constant monitoring.

Why should I allow being monitored, mostly without my knowledge and consent?

Patients are monitored for their own well being. I am being scrutinized for the well being of providers and their cash flow and efforts to get to me.

How are they monitoring me?

When I willingly enter a site and give away my personal data in exchanged for a personalized service in that siloed site, I must rely on their privacy policies and assurances that it will not be exposed to unauthorized use and abuse.

Once I’m monitored without my knowledge and consent, on the sites and searches I engage in, the situation is beyond my control and awareness.

Behavioral targeting – collects information on our web browsing patterns in sites, across sites, in an attempt to retarget us, offer targeted ads or a richer offering.  Companies such as Predicta, Adaptlogic…… just to name a few.

Listening platforms  are tools for establishing brand policies across our media. These companies   offer the full scale of monitoring data collection, analyzing it and consulting on what needs to be done. Here again the field is flourishing. The leading companies to offer that are: Nielsen MyBuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, Biz360  and Visible technologies for social media monitoring….

Medicine in reverse – full monitoring based service for the better health of marketers.

This is what they try to learn about us:

• Who are we, from a demographic point of view
• How do we converse  – with whom, through what channels, on what( our social graphs)
• What do we like from a social and psychological point of view

For that they need our data, stories and communities so they can penetrate our circles and apply the right ( for them) tools to reach us wherever and however we interact. In a digital world without fences  who needs manipulations from corporates who only see us as profit potential for their walled gardens, and the end justifies the  means.

Such monitoring should require a Helsinki committee’s consent.

Imagine giving your house keys, burglar alarm code and the safe’s combination to several service providers. Would you do that?

The growing privacy concerns caused the FTC to  publish  self regulation principles for targeting, and debates are ardent among privacy activists.

  The Icentered approach says – let’s reverse the paradigm.

If they want to understand us – why not just ask and get the opinion of whoever agrees to answer out of free consent. Means are plenty – even Twitter can be regarded as a great focus group.

Is this the reciprocal approach or the opposing one? Depends first and foremost on where you come from and what interests you are trying to preserve.

They say they can offer something that is good and relevant to me – I cordially welcome that. In the unmanageable downpour of information, messages and offerings that constantly compete for my attention – right on target for me is a blessing.

Our independence is what they fear most, in the conversation era, click away and long tail economy weaken their control and harm their brands’ performance. Once our captivity is no longer facilitated – Big brother is called in.

No one has the right, unsolicited,  to infiltrate my spheres, monitor my actions and patterns and hover around, manipulating my data.

Let me be the one to feed their voracious appetite with selected dishes from my pantry, at my will and choice, based on my interests, attention management and my willingness to share.

They can embrace the broadcast shopping attitude proposed by the project VRM , where clients will be able to expose their intention to buy on an online platform in an RFP (Request for proposal) manner.

 The Icentered lens lays the following principles:

You (providers) ask and if I want to tell you – I will – not through expert analytics – but straight from the horse’s mouth

You don’t need to pay 3^rd party companies to monitor me, invade my social graph and provide you with the tools to lure me.

My context is the anchor point of the whole food chain created around me. Once your offer is relevant to my context, I am an equal partner to this food chain, and should be rewarded for it.

Context is the reference base of all your explicit and implicit targeting efforts – let’s create a context based measuring scale that will become an open tool of the trade for enabling context based offerings.

This is contextometrics.

You want my attention –my context – it’s my capital – let’s monetize it as an alternative currency and trade in it directly.

This is contextonomics – the economics of my context.

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