Scott Voigt and Jonathan Bloch explain how companies get first-party data directly from their websites and apps, versus third-party data from brokers and public sources. Bloch's firm processes 700 daily feeds from exchanges and governments in 39 languages. Third-party data often comes from terms-of-service agreements that let companies sell consumer profiles.
Chapters
Where do organizations get their data from?
Obviously from lots of places. Captain Obvious would say in my world. So I'm CEO of a company called FullStory. And so most of our customers are paying a lot of attention to where they're getting their first party digital data. And in our case, that really comes from the visitors to their websites or their web apps or even, you know, the mobile device. And so they're just think, thinking about every specific action that a visitor is taking place and making sure that they're paying attention to the good ones and ignoring the bad ones or the private ones.
Okay, that seems fairly straightforward. You get some data directly when people come to your website and then there's going to be data from elsewhere. Jonathan, do you want to talk a bit more about like where people get the data from in your world?
Sure. So I'm CEO of a company called Exchange Data International, and we aggregate data from all exchanges around the world. So we get data from exchanges, from regulators, from central banks, from ministries of finance. All in all, we have probably 700 sources coming in daily and then we have to translate them into English. So we translate 39 languages a day because the world does not speak English.
Okay, that's a very good point, is that there's data all over the world and you want it in the right format that people in your organization can understand. Okay, so Scott, you mentioned the idea of like the difference between first party data, third party data. So the third party data coming from elsewhere, that's maybe a little murkier on what that involves. So Jonathan, you mentioned some examples of just banks and exchanges that provide data. Where else might you get your data from? What else constitutes third party data?
Well, in the digital realm, there are all sorts of third party sources where marketers can go to sort of buy profiles, if you will. If you've ever accepted some weird terms of services on different sites out there, they're collecting data on you, Facebook at all. And those, those are aggregated in different ways, sometimes anonymous, sometimes mapping back to you or your phone. Those sort of things are third party data. Where you're collecting data from around the web, first party really is, if you want to think about it, in sort of the real world, if someone were to walk into your store, they're in your store, your relationship is with that customer, you know them, you've created that relationship, that's first party data. And so the same would be true if somebody went to your website or your web app. You have that relationship with them. They've sort of accepted a terms of service, usually on the visit. Certainly in the EU that would be true. And that's first party data.
All right, so if it's coming through a separate organization, there's going to be third party data where you've not got that direct relationship with the customer. All right, and so with this third party data, it seems like there's going to be some sort of licensing involved. Jonathan, these sort of regulations around data, your area of expertise, what sort of data licenses are there for getting hold of this third party data?
Well, I mean, in terms of data and licensing, it's a very fraught area because there's a whole issue of copyright, there's a whole issue of trademarks, and increasingly you find lawsuits about this. So, for example, the New York Times and various other publications are suing the various AI operators, saying, this is our data. How can you use it in your AI machines? And those cases are still to be decided. And I spend a lot of my time dealing with this issue because the exchanges often say we own the copyright of this data, but you can't own copyright in figures and numbers. So what they try and do is they try to circumvent the copyright in a very underhand way. When you sign a contract with these exchanges, they say you recognize that they have copyright, so they then bind you contractually. And I think you're going to see that in other areas start happening now, because as data becomes more valuable, particularly for AI, people are going to assert their rights over things they do not own, but then they'll bind you contractually. So I suspect terms and conditions on websites and various other places will change significantly because of that.
