Two people discuss how we trade privacy for convenience with Google, Netflix, and Alexa. Without uniform regulation, companies decide their own limits on data collection and personalization. GDPR and US lawmakers are pushing back, but the real question is whether brands will actually restrain themselves.
Chapters
I think as a society we become desensitized to all the data we're giving up to get the convenience of AI powered solutions. But as we move into marketing, we run into the same problem where we're now giving all these brands data about us to make our lives more convenient in theory. And that opens up all kinds of ethical concerns.
So let's talk a little bit about ethics within artificial intelligence as it applies to marketing. Are there any risks or any areas concern that keep you up at night?
Yeah, it's actually my biggest personal concern about AI. And this isn't just marketing. I mean you can, whenever you want to try and understand where AI is going to go, we have to look outside of marketing and sales and service. We do have to even honestly, like at a government level, it's probably the best place to start. And so what you see happening at a government level and then down into other industries is a race to build the smarter solutions. And so anytime you have a race to lead the advancement of technology, there are the people who push forward no matter what, because they know other people will. If they don't, then there are the people who have to sit back and ask the difficult questions around the ethics and the morals of what's going to be done. So for AI to do it to achieve its promise of true personalization, of true prediction of what's going to happen is it requires a massive amount of data. And so if we just look at Google as an example, we think of all the data points Google collects on us from the emails, reading every email you send to where you go with Google Maps, to if you have Nest cameras installed in your house, who's coming, where they're coming from. If you turn on facial recognition, you literally know who they are and what they're doing. And the list can go on Google Assistant. So now you can ask it anything and it knows everything you ever asked. The way Google will eventually build a true assistant for your life where you can ask it like should I do this? Or what's going to happen tomorrow? Or whatever. It needs all the data to make those predictions. So there is certainly you give up privacy to get the convenience of personalization and the power of AI. But again, if you think about it in your consumer life, how many people sit there and think, wow, Google Maps used really powerful machine learning and knew all this stuff about where I go at 10 o' clock on average on weekdays to make this prediction about the best way to get there. I don't care. It's just like, oh wow. It already knew I was going to go there. Yep, hit start. Same thing with Netflix. Like you don't care that it knows everything you've watched and how much of it you watched and what you rated it. You just know that there's the next thing to watch and that's really convenient. So I think as a society, we become desensitized to all the data we're giving up and to get the convenience of AI powered solutions. But as we move into marketing, we run into the same problem where we're now giving all these brands data about us to make our lives more convenient, in theory. And that opens up all kinds of ethical concerns.
Yeah, definitely. We're starting to see a little bit of a backlash almost too with legislation like GDPR in Europe and there's a pretty vigorous debate in the United States about similar laws protecting personal data and how personal data is used. Do you think that any risk of things becoming too personalized?
Oh, yeah. But again, I think we're desensitized to it. So there was the example a month or so ago about Alexa accidentally sending all these messages to some random person in someone's address book. And it's a headline for like three hours, which was it? Ring left open all their data on a server to where every employee within Ring had access to every video that was stored on their servers. And so like all that data is sitting there and like stuff happens and you're like, oh, this is it. Like, this is the one where people are gonna start pulling back and they're not gonna buy that brand anymore. They're gonna shut their Facebook accounts down because Facebook did X, Y and Z again. And, and then it doesn't happen. And then like 24 hours later, people forget that it even occurred. And so I think there's just, there's so, so much, so many examples of privacy being put aside in, in favor of personalization and convenience that, and especially as you look like the younger generation, they just don't seem to care. And so I don't know if it's intentional. Like if, if the big brands have, you know, tried to desensitize us over time to the need to give up the privacy. Like, Facebook's a great example. You can turn off its tracking and its personalization of ads, but you're still going to see ads. So the option is, well, I still want to use Facebook. Well, I guess if I'm going to see ads, I'd rather see ones that are relevant to me. That's how they win. And the same thing with Google or any of them. Like the value exchange for my data usually ends up being greater than not letting them have it. And, and that's knowing what's happening to the data. The average consumer has no idea, nor do they care what's happening to their data. Unless something really bad happens. They just, life's just easier and you go on and you do the next thing.
Yeah, definitely. That's, that's actually part of HubSpot's customer code, is to use my data, but don't abuse it. So it is beneficial to see a more personalized, tailored experience, whether that's in a web app or on a website. But people can definitely go too far and sometimes you see an ad that's a little too spooky and I think that makes people uncomfortable.
Yeah, and it's a hard conversation. So our marketing AI conference we're doing in July, the theme is more intelligent, more human. And that's the whole idea, is that we can build smarter solutions and we can use smarter solutions as a marketer, but we also have an obligation as marketers to understand the human side of what we're doing. And so where those guardrails come from really at this point is. Well, I mean, unless it's GDPR related, the guardrails are brand specific. Like you decide as a brand how far you're going to push to achieve personalization and to drive the next sale or the next hit, the next revenue goal. And those are hard decisions. And again, there's no set playbook right now. And I think it's important that we're having those conversations.
