If a service is free, you’re the product, not the end user. Data is now worth more than gold, and every action you and your business make produces a potential gold mine.
By this point, it’s pretty common knowledge that your personal data is valuable and sold to the highest bidder so that many companies can effectively market and produce products. The same is true for your business. The world of business-to-business services is as big, if not bigger than the direct-to-consumer market. According to Vantage Market Research, the B2B e-commerce market is valued at $18.8 trillion, as a result, the value of your organisational data is as high as your late-night shopping habits, takeaway preference and likelihood to book a last-minute city break.
In this week’s article we’re going to cover four things:
Online data gathering is at times Orwellian in nature. You’ll have noticed that our phones listen to us to sell us toothpaste and that when you visit one website you’ll then get bombarded by their adverts elsewhere.
But it gets worse than this. Apple has patented technology to read a user’s bank balance for Apple Wallet, but as you can imagine a powerful bit of knowledge to have. Roomba maps and uploads blueprints of your house and furniture to Amazon’s cloud platform AWS. Facebook can predict when you’re going to break up with your partner. Lastly, in a world-changing series of events, Cambridge Analytica harvested social media data for political gain.
For a long time the wild west, over recent years new regulations and standards have reigned in the scope of data gathering. Between GDPR, CCPA and Google Consent Mode there are new limits on what tech companies, software providers and websites can do. However, there are still many grey areas that many enter into by clicking the dreaded “I agree” at the end of the terms and conditions.
Then there’s an elephant in the room – scandal. The industry never knows who’s actually playing by the book and who isn’t, until the news breaks that X tech company has ignored regulations for the past decade.
This is a vital bit of information that determines the difference between many providers of software – both on a technical and ethical level.
Hubspot publicly states that they don’t sell your data, that it only feeds into part of their big-picture data for their useful industry reports. Salesforce isn’t so clear and it’s often the way for many big or smaller SaaS providers in alternative niches. If you use LinkedIn, your profile can be found with ease through the platform’s sales navigator – a subscription-based tool for sales teams to identify potential leads.
With data being gathered on all levels of your business, we must ask what can be done with it. Within an organisation that already works with you, it could be used to remarket adjacent services or improve the services that you’re already being provided. But this isn’t the only thing that can be done with your data.
Businesses and individuals that are to gain from your organisation either through malicious acts or genuine business want to get this data to take action on it.
It’s highly likely that at some point you’ve started receiving spam and scam texts, calls or emails. Your details ended up somehow on a database for sale. This could have been through a business you gave your details to or through a data breach. Either way, it’s information that people are prepared to pay handsomely for.
While it may be useful to have a new business selling useful tech to your business’s pain points. It also means that people outside of your organisation know about your business problems, pain points and where you can improve. Invaluable information in the hands of your competition, enabling them to out-innovate your business, leaving you behind the competition.
If we return to the example of a Roomba mapping out the blueprints of your house on an Amazon server, while very few have an office robot vacuum cleaner – most of us do have a plethora of security tools that understand our networks and hand over this information.
Now say your company runs an active email marketing database either in the form of a cloud-hosted spreadsheet or email provider. You’re responsible for guarding the data in that database as dictated by GDPR – be the source of a leak and you could face large consequences.
Then you’ve also got all of your financial data and information about your current customer base.
After reading this far, and existing in 21st-century society, you’ll hopefully have a grasp of how much data can be gathered from our lives and businesses. There are numerous ways you can protect yourself.
First, you need to read the terms and conditions you’re agreeing to to understand how your data is used. But what if I’ve not got the time? Well, you can simply hop into ChatGPT and ask it to surmise what you need to know. While you can’t prevent data breaches, you can at least understand how your data is going to be used when you sign up for a new social media or SaaS platform.
Second – your business needs to retain control over its data and when dealing with international software providers you don’t get to set the playing field, nor get to set the deal. When commissioning a bespoke custom software solution, such as those we produce at Shoothill, this can become a major focus.
When security is a major concern the details of this can be brought into the deal, coming down to even smaller details such as where your data is hosted.
