Know Your Customer…

The timing of this post with Google venturing into boutiques is purely coincidental…

For those who don’t know… Sometime back the do no evil company acquired a nice little shiny website called as like.com .. Its a visual search based shopping portal. Head to it to know more about it. Now google has added a new portal called as boutique.com which is more or less an extension to it.

This service is powered by a test that analyzes your preferences in terms of styles, brands, hues etc for apparels and accessories. Users are also subjected to an assortment of designs etc on which they can give feedback.
The tool called as stylyser will analyze your feedback and will help you with your shopping.

Currently the services are open only for a complex breed of creatures who are difficult to be patterned as algorithms. Once google with its powerful analyzing abilities crack this code, it will move into easier challenges and set up a men section too. The portal currently caters to the women folk of the US of A!

Back to the topic.. Know your customer… Ofcourse everyone knows this circa 2010 message.. Except probably for Indian banks and service sector where it had to be introduced more like a mandate. Ofcourse there are exceptions too which tracks the customers and give them a more or less custom made offerings. At times they push you so much that it appears as an intrusion to your privacy, or at times they just fake it. Haven’t we all got those wonderfully lovely tele calls that offers us a brilliant card/insurance/loan for our fantastic past behavior or out employment history and so on.. But don’t have a clue on even a simple thing like our name!! Wtf!!

So why this rant… This comes just as a proof of concept.. Like everyone harped about.. The age old thumb rule of KYC just got interesting with technology both using it and leveraging it. Like we all already know, the web is already and ocean of information and would soon be an ocean of personal information too. The one who can milk it well can dish out some really interesting deals. Who better than google can do that!
Here’s a small list.. Not exhaustive though…
Google knows you!
It knows who are your friends via email and Orkut!
It knows what are you up to via google buzz..
It knows where you have been via google maps..
It knows your special events.. Via calendar,
It knows where you enjoy your vacation via picassa..
It knows who are you talking to via the android phone, gtalk..
It obviously knows A HELL lot about which sites you visit and your taste in music, websites, search and heck even the porn you fantasize!
It knows what documents you are sharing and with whom.. It knows your mobile number.. It knows your bank/card details via checkout and what not!

All in all it just knows a little too much about you!!! Now all of this may seem harmless in first sight.. But that’s obnoxious look that data has! It looks harmless! Only until someone organizes the data into sequential information.. And then transposes the information into knowledge and there you have it.. A perfectly harmlessly seeming data point is transformed into a very sensible and at times sensitive ‘knowledge’ about you: the prospective customer!
Facebook launching email! Social networking sites opening dime a dozen and a lot of information being asked for either in pretext of an emotional appeal or a casual friendly gesture and what not.. Does this all makes sense now..?

Its a gazzilion people out there… Of whom you could decide to target anyone and know quite a lot about them just by a little snooping around! It might not even need a very high end processing platform (wait! Google has that too!) a little bit or social engineering would do just fine too!

Cheers! The worst is yet to come!