So Amazon.com introduced a new phone yesterday. And what does it do? It allows you to point it at some knick-knack you might want to buy and Amazon tells you how much you can buy it for from them.
What is really does, of course, is give yet more information to Amazon and its partners as to your every thought, whim and desire. What does it do for the consumer? Not so much. You can already go to their website, after all, and see what they have.
Here is the problem, which should have been obvious, if it wasn’t already with the big scandal over Edward Snowden and the NSA spying on us: People hate to be spied on.
Google, which started out with a mantra of “Don’t be evil” loves to collect information on you. So too does LinkedIn, which seems to like snooping through your contacts, then using those names to send out spam.
Lawyers should learn from this: Because this is everything you should not do.
Lawyers provide a service; our clients are our mission. When retained, we are supposed to do the job we were hired to do as diligently as possible, not use it as an excuse to find yet more clients. The client comes first.
We’ve seen a few examples in the past, of course. One example was a Chicago criminal defense lawyer using his potential retention by Lindsay Lohan as an excuse to give a press interview. We’ve seen it also with lawyers that place stupid ad damnum clauses in Complaints hoping that they can get their names in the paper.
Except it isn’t about the lawyer. It’s about the client.
So watch Amazon and Google and LinkedIn and learn from them about the stuff you should not be doing.
Although I have been working with and using the internet almost since it began (before there were browsers, for example — remember Veronica?) I am always amazed at how much it is now ruled by marketing.
It’s not just email spam — it’s everything designed to get you to notice a product, company or service — for however short a time. And to do that they mine and mine and mine.
Along those lines, at the request of an associate of mine, I broke my vow never to join Twitter just so I could, at his request, follow his tweets. He sent that invitation to one of my several email addresses associated with my showbiz personna. Upon opening the new Twitter account, I was immediately presented with a list of more people I should (according to Twitter) be following. A startling number of those were people with whom I had had some form of email contact in the past. Wow! How did they know? Or was it coincidence?
Somewhere I believe there is a non-NSA datamine operation (or several) swallowing up whole reams of personal data about us that only comes to the fore when something like this happens. Open a new account with a pharmacy, and get hit with personal ads for products to treat conditions that you thought only your doctor knew about. Only a matter of time. Yuk.
So, add Twitter to your watch list, above, as well as any other “social media” provider you can think of.
Hey, NSA! How many fingers am I holding up right now?
(Answer: that one).
Open a new account with a pharmacy, and get hit with personal ads for products to treat conditions that you thought only your doctor knew about. Only a matter of time. Yuk.
Too late. Read the story of how Target thought a teen was pregnant based on some incidentals she was buying, such an unscented lotion, and sent a pregnancy catalogue to her house. Her parents were livid that Target thought their daughter was pregnant. She was; and they hadn’t known…
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
And thus was born a whole new diagnostic tool!
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