imran*ali

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 edition of O’Reilly’s flagship conference, ETech.

One of the more fascinating sessions was Sharon Biggar’s Sense and Sensibilities (What Happens When You Can Measure Our Offline Reality Like You Can the Online World?).

Biggar outlined the work of her company, Path Intelligence, in sensing radio signals from GSM phones to visualise the routes consumers take through airports, malls and other ‘high footfall’ public locations.

The session focussed less on the company’s pioneering Path Intelligence Explorer solutions, for clients, and more on underlying issues of privacy and anonymity. Biggar went to great lengths to describe the anonymity of data collected by the company, but also the view with which subjects responded to online and offline tracking, resulting in a series of ‘privacy principles’ that the company adhere to.

Biggar concluded that…

• Online businesses have a competitive advantage over offline due to their knowledge of user/shopper behaviour
• Technology changes are bringing online analytics to the offline world
• Sensing can collect information that traditional market research cannot provide
• But with the phenomenal power of new sensing techniques comes a responsibility to protect privacy
• Path Intelligence have four privacy principles that we follow and we would like to see these enshrined across the industry
• Our privacy principles are: OPEN – Open, Protect, Educate and Notify