Jim pens one of the best reasoned discussions of customer tracking I had ever read, and wades in between me and Jeff Young at ZDNet — The Cookie Monster.
Accountability is a drag, but as the man sang, “You gotta serve somebody.” Or as the Cliche Goon’s say, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
I’ll say it again and again — metrics is not an abrogation of a customer’s rights to privacy. If you trust the brand and the brand doesn’t sell your name down the river, well, what’s the beef?
And I’ll go back to the Scott McNealy quote: “We have no privacy. Get over it.”
The late Tom Mandel — he of the W.E.L.L., SRI and the person who put Time Magazine online — once had a fascinating lunch discussion in Palo Alto about a book idea for the “Compleat Paranoid’s Guide to Living Off the Grid.” Basically, we wondered if a person could exist in contemporary America with no social security number, no ID, no nothing. These conversations happening when the privacy freaks were losing their marbles over Caller ID on their phones.
thanks for the plug, David. Mandel was such a hoot, I was surprised to find out that the Hawaiians actually lt him off tnenisland when he graduated from college. hawaiinprizes smart eclectic intellectuals a lot.
Have some duck and ask Dede about an agent.
Jim