Everyone knows the feeling when something crosses over the line to creepy. There is a threshold that is crossed and the feeling is instant. As AI gets smarter and our technology more sophisticated companies and governments are finding new ways to creep their customers, citizens and stakeholders out.
Most people accept a certain level of surveillance, especially in the workplace. We accept that a phone call with a customer service agent will be recorded for quality assurance and we have rules in place governing disclosure. We can see the security cameras at a bank that are put in place to keep an eye on the bank tellers, but also deter theft.
This seems reasonable to us, we have an innate sense of balance and we look at having targeted surveillance with an implicit goal of thwarting theft (keeping employees safe) and auditing the customer experience (this call is recorded for quality assurance) as necessary evils in order to participate in the modern economy.
But what about this:
…a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.
This seems unreasonable but is hard to articulate why. It is functionally the same thing, but the scale is much more immense. It doesn’t feel the same and, in this example, we have encountered a categorical difference.
A categorical shift crosses a boundary and requires a different framework for thinking about a given scenario or problem. A categorical shift places you in a whole new world. From Aladdin:
So what does this mean for a business? At what point do you cross the line from a reasonable amount of data collection to a categorical violation of your customers trust?
There is an immense amount of hidden risk to your business in gathering so much data. It creeps customers out, and it is so easy to fall into the wrong hands. Here are three things you can do to avoid this:
- Don’t save the data – Resist the urge to save the data. Sure, the cost of saving data is small but the risk is huge. It doesn’t take much for the data to get into the wrong hands and you can never be 100% sure that it is secure. (Hacker guesses a password, an employee goes rogue). Mitigate the risk by deleting it after you’ve collected / used it and never have to worry about a breach in trust because you have nothing to take.
- Define a data collection policy – If you don’t write a policy that defines how you collect data, the timeline that you save data and what data is off limits then you are choosing to accept the default. Your employees will create their own policy and process that meets their specific need (rather than the company or customer need) and it creates a big (but often unnoticed) risk down the road.
- Put yourself in the customer’s shoes – Understanding the context of your customer helps you understand where their boundaries are – and where you run the risk of making a categorical mistake. Consider the “Working Backwards” framework that Amazon uses for this exercise.
Please Think Responsibly 