The Creepy Line

Whilst the constantly changing world of technology is interesting, the way it affects our lives, opinions and behaviour is where marketeers should focus. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the way technology affects our privacy. In the Digital Strategy Sessions I run, I call this The Creepy Line. It’s the feeling or idea of technology becoming too pervasive. The interesting aspect is that everyone has a different threshold. For some, being tracked their every waking moment is a positive choice, as they see immediate useful feedback, maybe in the shape of health data - such as sleep or exercise patterns. For others, the mission is to stay ‘off-grid’ to as great an extent as possible. For most, it’s somewhere in between where people are happy to offer up very intimate details about their lives in some areas, such as a fertility app, but want to keep everything else under wraps. Understanding where your customers’ Creepy Line sits and what, if anything, you can do to influence it, is increasingly important. The difficulty arises when using so-called second or third party data – or someone else’s first party data as it’s sometimes known. Third parties may guarantee the ethically sound nature of their data using, ‘privacy-safe’, ‘scrubbing’ techniques to remove Personally Identifiable Information (PIIs). However, such talk immediately takes me over The Creepy Line.