Meet Kai

I got pretty excited when I came across this posting. Taking a look at Customer 2.0, or at least that is what they are doing at Microsoft.

“Have you met Kai? Kai is the name that we (the MS IT EA Team) are thinking of giving to Customer 2.0. She is young and lively and one of the most demanding customers we’ve had to deal with on the web. Know why? Because she expects us all to grow up……..

Kai is calling to you to make her internet experience Fun, Social, and Engaging. If she uses your services today, that does not mean she will use them tomorrow. She is brand loyal, but your site will hold her attention primarily if it holds the attention of her community. Her group. Welcome to the fad.No more expecting Kai to live with badly designed sites. She learned about programming in high school (or middle school) and is unafraid of making her own mashups. That said, she doesn’t need to. You will provide something beautiful to her. She is outright offended when she sees a site or service that she feels is not professional or trustworthy. She’d never hand her friends over to something klunky.

A few demographics will bring this into focus. Kai may live in a western country… or not. She is as likely to be speaking Mandarin Chinese or Hindi as she is to be speaking Spanish or English. “

Identity Linkage and Privacy – part 2 published

Hi, I have just noticed that the second part of my article on Identity Linkage and Privacy has been published by ISSA. The link below will take you directly to the article if you are a member of ISSA. If you want a copy of the article and you are not a member of ISSA just make a comment on this mail and I can get the pdf to you. Email me directly if you have my email address.

Identity Linkage and Privacy – Part 2

By Karen Lawrence Öqvist

Where ever we go, whatever we do in our everyday lives, our personal information is being collected somewhere by someone or something, online and offline.

Facebook is bowing to protests

Lauren has a good posting about Facebook and how they have implemented a Beacon system. I mentioned this in a previous post. What this does is notifies your friends when you have purchased something. Basically boils down to that SPAMMING has evolved, to ‘let’s spam our friends’… nice world. So here we have Facebook that has better privacy controls for the user than let’s say MySpace, and then Facebook goes and spoils it by implementing this blatant invasion of privacy. I don’t want all my ‘friends’ to be notified of everything I purchase. Maybe in 10-20 years it will be normal, but NOT today.

Anyhow they have now changed the system so you need to approve before a notification is sent to your friends. Although I agree with Lauren’s view completely, what’s wrong with a simple Opt-out? We should have a choice and it should not be defaulted to Opt-in or click this button to keep your privacy every single time you purchase something, we should have the choice to set our default settings to Opt-out or Opt-in. And if we choose to Opt-out, it should stay that way unless we -the user- change it!