BadTech Is the Next New Thing

Forget about Martech, Adtech, or even Madtech. The next big thing is BadTech.

I’m referring to is the backlash against big tech firms – Google, Amazon, Apple, and above all Facebook – that have relentlessly expanded their influence on everyday life. Until recently, these firms were mostly seen as positive, or at least benignly neutral, forces that made consumers’ lives easier.  But something snapped after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last March.  Scattered concerns became a flood of hostility.  Enthusiasm curdled into skepticism and fear.  The world recognized a new avatar of evil: BadTech.

As a long-standing skeptic (see this from 2016), I’m generally pleased with this development. The past month alone offers plenty of news to alarm consumers:

• Google tracks location even after users turn off Location Sharing.
• telecom lobbyists have successfully blocked close to 70 privacy bills so far this year.
• big gaps in social media efforts to block even someone as clearly horrid as Infowars’ Alex Jones – famous for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
• Facebook reinstated social monitoring vendor Crimson Hexagon despite concerns that government agencies were using it to monitor public activities.
• Amazon’s facial recognition software falsely matched 28 U.S. Congress members with mugshots.
• Artifical intelligence training data often creates unintentional bias and there's no standard method to prevent this.
• Russian hackers continue to attack U.S. (and other) elections.

There's more bad news for marketers and other business people:

• clients' customer data was exposed by Salesforce.com (although there’s no evidence that anything was actually leaked).
• up to 70% of video spend goes to unauthorized sellers.
• fake followers comprise up to one-third of Instagram influencers’ audiences.
• few organizations are succeeding in their AI investments.

Not surprisingly, consumers, businesses, and governments have reacted with new skepticism, concern, and even some action:

• Americans fear losing their personal data more than losing their physical wallet
• only Amazon ranks in the top five of the 20 most trusted companies.  Google, Apple and Microsoft are six, eight, and nine.  Facebook isn’t anywhere on the list.
• European Union puts teeth in regulations that require removal of extremist content within one hour.
• California legislature passes strong data privacy law.
• advertisers infatuation with blockchain is starting to fizzle.

But all is not perfect.

• BadTech firms still plunge ahead with dangerous projects. For example, despite the clear and increasing dangers from poorly controlled AI, it’s being distributed more broadly by Ebay, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle. 
• Other institutions merrily pursue their own questionable ideas. Here we have General Motors and Shell opening new risks by connecting cars to gas pumps.  Here – this is not a joke – a university is putting school-controlled Amazon Echo listening devices in every dorm room

• The press continues to get it wrong. This New York Times Magazine piece presents California’s privacy law as a triumph for its citizen-activist sponsor, when he in fact traded a nearly-impossible-to change referendum for a law that will surely be gutted before it takes effect in 2020.

• Proponents will overreach. This opinion piece argues the term “privacy policy” should be banned because consumers think the label means a company keeps their data private. This is a side issue at best; at worst, it tries to protect people from being lazy. Balancing privacy against other legitimate concerns will be hard enough without silly distractions.

So welcome to our latest brave new world, where BadTech is one more villain to fear   It's progress that people recognize the issues but we can't let emotion overwhelm considered solutions.  Let’s use the moment to address the real problems without creating new ones or throwing away what’s genuinely good.  We can't afford to fail.

Building Trust Requires Innovation

Trust has been chasing me like a hungry mosquito. It seems that everyone has suddenly decided that creating trust is the key to success, whether it’s in the context of data sharing, artificial intelligence, or customer retention. Of course, I reached that conclusion quite some time ago (see this blog from late 2015) so I’m pleased to have the company.   But I’m also trying to figure out where we all need to go next.

I picked up a book on trust the other day (haven’t gotten past the introduction, so can’t say yet whether I’d recommend it) that seems to argue the problem of trust is different today because trust was traditionally based on central authority but authority itself has largely collapsed. The author sees a new, distributed trust model built on transparent, peer-based reputation (think Uber and Airbnb)* that lets people confidently interact with strangers. The chapter headings suggest she ends up proposing blockchain as the ultimate solution. This seems like more weight than any technology can bear and may just be evidence of silver bullet syndrome.   But it does hint at why blockchain has such great appeal: it’s precisely in tune with the anti-authority tenor of our times.

From a marketer’s perspective, what’s important here is not that blockchain might provide trust but that conventional authority certainly cannot. This means that most trust-building methods marketers naturally rely on, which are based in traditional authority, probably won’t work. Things like celebrity endorsements, solemn personal promises from the CEO, and references to company size or history carry little weight in a hyper-skeptical environment. Even consumer reviews and peer recommendations are suspect in a world where people don’t trust that they’re genuine. What’s needed are methods that let people see things for themselves: a sort of radical transparency that doesn’t require relying on anyone else’s word, including (or perhaps especially) the word of “people just like me”.

One familiar example is comparison shopping engines that don’t recommend a particular product but  make it easy for users to compare alternatives and pick the option they like best. A less obvious instance would be a navigation app that shows traffic conditions and estimated times for alternate routes: it might present what it considers the best choice but also makes it easy for the user to see what’s happening and, implicitly, why the system’s recommendation makes sense. Other examples include package tracking apps that remove uncertainty (and thus reduce anxiety) by showing the movement of a shipment towards the customer, customer service apps that track the location of a repair person as he approaches for a service call, or phone queue systems that estimate waiting time and state how many customers are ahead of the caller.  A determined skeptic could argue that such solutions can't be trusted because the systems themselves could be dishonest.  But any falsehoods would quickly become apparent when a package or repair person didn’t arrive as expected, so they are ultimately self-validating.

Of course, many activities are not so easily verified. Claims related to data sharing are high on that list: it’s pretty much impossible for a customer to know how their data has been used or whether it has been shared without their permission. This is the European Union’s approach to privacy in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) makes so much sense: the rules include a requirement to track each use of personal data, documentation of authority for that use, and a right of individuals to see the history of use. That’s very different attitude from the U.S. approach, which has much looser consent requirements and no individual rights to review companies' actual behaviors.  In other words, the EU approach creates a forced transparency that builds trust, especially false information would be a legally-punishable offense.

There’s a slender chance that the GDPR approach will be adopted in the U.S. in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, although the odds are greatly against it. More likely, companies that are not Facebook will unite to oppose any legislation, even if Facebook itself sits on the sidelines. (That’s exactly what’s happening right now in California.)  The more intriguing possibility is that Facebook alone will adopt GDPR policies in the U.S. – as it has not very convincingly promised – and that this will pressure other companies to do the same.  Color me skeptical on that scenario: Facebook will probably renege once public attention turns elsewhere and few consumers will stop using services they enjoy due to privacy considerations.  In fact, if you look closely at studies of consumer attitudes, what you ultimately see is that consumers don’t really put a very high value on their personal data or privacy in general.

What does scare them is identity theft, so it’s just possible that regulations addressing that issue might provide privacy protections as a bonus. That’s especially true if consumers decide they don’t trust the government to enforce data protection standards but, following the distributed authority model, instead demand transparency so they can verify compliance to “self-enforce” the rules for themselves.  Yet this too is a long shot: few current political leaders or privacy activists are likely to adopt so subtle a strategy.

In short, the government won't solve the trust problem for marketers, so they'll need to find their own solutions.  This means they have to devise trust building measures, convince their companies to adopt them, and then educate customers about how they work.  This is an especially hard challenge because the traditional, authority-based methods of gaining trust are no longer effective. Finding effective new methods is an opportunity for innovation and competitive advantage, which are fun, and for long hours and failed experiments, which are less fun but part of the package. Either way, you really have no choice: as that mosquito keeps telling me, trust is essential for success in today’s environment.

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* both firms with corporate trust issues of their own, ironically.

HubSpot Announces LinkedIn, Facebook Partnerships and Free Marketing Automation Edition at INBOUND Conference

HubSpot held its annual INBOUND conference in Boston last week. Maybe it's me, but the show seemed to lack some of its usual self-congratulatory excitement: for example, CEO Brian Halligan didn’t present the familiar company scorecard touting growth in customers and revenues. (A quick check of financial reports shows those are just fine: the company is expecting about 45% revenue increase for 2016.) Even the insights that Halligan and co-founder Dharmesh Shah presented in their keynotes seemed familiar: I'm guessing you've already heard that video, social, messaging, free trials, and chatbots will be big.

My own attention was more focused on the product announcements. The big news was a free version of HubSpot’s core marketing platform, joining free versions already available of its CRM and Sales systems. (In Hubspeak, CRM is the underlying database that tracks and manages customer interactions, while Sales is tools for salesperson productivity in email and elsewhere.)  Using free versions to grow marketing automation has consistently failed in the past, probably because people attracted by a free system aren't willing to do the substantial work needed for marketing automation success.  But HubSpot managers are aware of this history and seem confident they have a way to cost-effectively nurture a useful fraction of freemium users towards paid status. We'll see.

The company also announced enhancements to existing products. Many were features that already exist in other mid-tier systems, including branching visual workflows, sessions within Web analytics reports, parent/child relationships among business records, and detailed control over user permissions. As HubSpot explained it, the modest scope of these changes reflects a focus on simplifying the system rather than making it super-powerful. One good example of this attitude was a new on-site chat feature, which seems basic enough but has some serious hidden cleverness in automatically routing chat requests to the right sales person, pulling up the right CRM record for the agent, and adding the chat conversation to the customer history.

One feature that did strike me as innovative was closer to HubSpot’s roots in search marketing: a new “content strategy” tool reflecting the shift from keywords to topics as the basis of search results. HubSpot’s tool helps marketers find the best topics to try to dominate with their content.  This will be very valuable for marketers unfamiliar with the new search optimization methods. Still, what you really want is a system that helps you create that content.  HubSpot does seem to be working on that.

With relatively modest product news, the most interesting announcements at the conference were probably about HubSpot’s alliances.  A new Facebook integration lets users create Facebook lead generation campaigns within HubSpot and posts leads from those campaigns directly to the HubSpot database. A new LinkedIn integration shows profiles from LinkedIn Sales Navigator within HubSpot CRM screens for users who have a Sales Navigator subscription. Both integrations were presented as first steps towards deeper relationships. These relationships reflect the growing prominence of HubSpot among CRM/marketing automation vendors, which gives companies like Microsoft and LinkedIn a reason to pick HubSpot as a partner. This, in turn, lets HubSpot offer features that less well-connected competitors cannot duplicate. That sets up a positive cycle of growth and expansion that is very much in HubSpot’s favor.

As an aside, the partnerships raise the question of whether Microsoft might just purchase HubSpot and use it to replace or supplement the existing Dynamics CRM products. Makes a lot of sense to me.  A Facebook purchase seems unlikely but, as we also learned last week, unlikely things do sometimes happen.

Privacy: Does Anybody Care?

To paraphrase HL Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the American public's commitment to privacy. "Quit Facebook Day" reportedly generated 31,000 account closings, compared with the roughly 500,000 new accounts that Facebook adds each day.

This lack of interest in privacy is a tremendous pity, because privacy violations can cause many types of real harm:

- identity theft
- physical violations including stalking and burglary when people are known to be out
- unjustified commercial treatment (e.g. denial of credit or employment) based on irrelevant or incorrect information
- unjustified government activity (e.g., placement on a No Fly list) based on irrelevant or incorrect information

Ironically, such problems seem to generate less public concern than techniques such as "behavioral targeting", even though the consequence of that is...um...receiving a relevant advertisement. I fully understand the real issue is people feel creepy to know that someone is sort-of watching them. But it's probably a good thing to remind them because the watching will continue whether behavioral targeting is regulated or not.

As the Facebook example shows, most people really don't care enough about privacy to protect it at the cost of other benefits, even minor ones like participating in Facebook. Similarly, many Americans seem downright eager to sacrifice their privacy from government surveillance in the name of national security.

The pity is that it's not an either/or choice. In many cases, technology can be designed to preserve privacy and still give the desired benefits. As a good example of what privacy-consciousness looks like when someone really cares, consider how the gun buyers are protected: gun dealers must check buyers' names against a database of felons, but the buyers' names are erased after a few days. (Of course, loopholes apply to "gun shows" but that's another discussion.) Another example -- never implemented so far as I know -- is that instead of reading drivers license information to prove patrons are old enough to drink, bars could have devices that simply scan the license and flash a green or red light depending on whether the person is old enough.

The point in both cases is that systems can be designed to access and retain the minimum amount of information necessary to fulfill their function. Many behavioral targeting systems already work this way -- capturing relevant data but not the actual identity of an individual. These principles could be applied more broadly and more systematically, but only if the people designing and regulating these systems made them a priority.

In practice it seems that other, less rational approaches are being adopted because they are more popular. To quote Mencken again, “For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.”

Without being excessively cynical, I think it's relevant to point out that privacy doesn't have much of a lobby, at least compared with, say, the National Rifle Association. Businesses want to collect data for marketing purposes. Consumer-friendly government officials are the natural opponents of this collection, but are constrained because many government agencies want the data for their own social and security purposes. The only organized opposition comes from a small set of privacy activists who themselves vary considerably in their priorities and capabilities. This means that, as a marketer, I don't spend much energy worrying about seriously restrictive privacy regulations -- even though I'd actually like to see some intelligent restrictions on data gathering by both business and government.