No Secrets Anymore

Behram Mistree talks about his data mining and analytics experiment using Facebook while he was at MIT, transcript from CNN interview on CNN Newsroom below:

See video here. Note that the highlighted information below was removed from the video.

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VELSHI: Let's talk more about how your personal information can be used to find out things about you, particularly on a social networking site. Let's bring in the co-author from a M.I.T. study, getting his Ph.D at Stanford right now. And Carter Jurnegean (ph) is from Boston. Same study. He is now a software developer.

OK, guys, you -- used your study. Just let me know if this is clear. You went on Facebook, and basically from people's information on there, figured out their sexual orientation. Is that basically it?

BEHRAM MISTREE, M.I.T. STUDY AUTHOR: Yes, sir. Absolutely. In essence, what we were trying to test is the age-old adage, birds of a feather flock together and have it apply it to the digital age. And is our research showed that based on your friends online, we could infer information about you, whether you disclosed that information about yourself or not.

VELSHI: Carter, is that particularly scientific? Because I guess you could sort of figure it out when you look at things like that or figure out where somebody is from, based on where their largest concentration of friends is, or where they went to college, even if they didn't put that on. Were your findings sort of a mystery to you?

CARTER JERNIGAN, M.I.T. STUDY AUTHOR: Well, I mean, I think what was novel about our research is that we've really shown that this birds-of-a-feather phenomenon applies in online communities, even when people don't publicly disclose information. So, if your profile had basically no information and it was very bare bones, just by seeing who you're associated with, we could still learn certain significant information about you.

VELSHI: Let's take it beyond sexual orientation. Where else could you be vulnerable about people learning things you didn't feel like you wanted to have known on Facebook, for instance?

JERNIGAN: That's a great question --

MISTREE: Go ahead.

There's emerging work that's suggesting that similar information could be found based on -- about political affiliations, religious affiliations, income bracket, those kinds of things. So, there's nothing to suggest that this work is just specific to sexual orientation. In reality, for this type of network data, you could have lots of privacy risks associated across a gamut of different traits.

VELSHI: Carter, if I were gay, I may not want to say that on Facebook, but it may not matter to me if that information was out there. If I live in Atlanta, I may not say I'm from Atlanta, it may not matter that it gets there.

Where do you draw the line as to protect information you don't want out there? Should I be on Facebook if I don't want people to know where I live, where I shop, who my friends are or what my sexual orientation is? Is it just too much information to be able to protect yourself?

JERNIGAN: Right. And it's -- become very difficult to keep all of that information private. And so as part of our research, we were very interested in raising awareness in these sort of surprising risks with online privacy. So as I said, again, a lot of people think oh, well, our research doesn't apply, because, you know, I don't have any information on my own profile.

VELSHI: Right.

JERNIGAN: But again, we were really interested in raising awareness, even if you think you have done the best job you can do to keep information private, that may not be the case.

VELSHI: Behram, there's a quote in your study from Scott Abrams, the creator of Dilbert. I just want to share this with you. It says, "Let's say that someday, technology will allow anyone to find out every possible thing about my life. I can compensate by being so uninteresting to that nobody could survive the process of snooping on me without lapsing into a coma."

Is that really going to be the solution?

MISTREE: Perhaps it is. But just so that you know, even if you're very uninteresting to the average person, you're very interesting to different companies. So, there's a real financial incentive for these -- for lots of large companies to have information about for marketing and other types of purposes. So, whether or not you're very uninteresting to the average person, you're very interesting to, say, an advertiser.

VELSHI: Carter, any conclusions here about how we should behave online?

JERNIGAN: I think, really, being aware of the fact that any actions you take online, you know, can have unintended privacy consequences. And so, again, it's this awareness that we think is really important.

VELSHI: But you're not advocating that people don't put information in, you're just saying they should know what it is.

JURNIGAN: I mean, I think it's going to be up to each person's own decision. I think disconnecting yourself entirely from technology is going to have its own consequences, just as well as connecting yourself with technology has consequences. And so, you know, full disclosure and being fully aware is definitely a very good first step.

VELSHI: Great study, guys. We were chopping off little bits of this technology, privacy issue to try and understand it better. Thanks for helping us. Behran Mistree is one of the co-authors of the study and the other Carter Jernigan, joining me from Boston. Thanks, guys.

MISTREE: Thank you.

America's consumer goes from "Be Like" to "I Am"

"There is no such thing as "the American consumer"".

States an article in AdAge - "No more Joe consumer in America", here.  One key to this shift has been the American consumer's ability to voice a choice, ability to create and join communities of choice, and the choice being the brand that fulfills a need.  Did the Internet help enable this?

This democratization of the American demographic is discussed in a white paper (for you to purchase) here by Mr. Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP's Ogilvy & Mather and founder of American Demographic magazine.  He states that:

"The iconic American family - married couple with children - will account for a mere 22% of households."

The changes represent the continued growth of digital communication mediums, while emphasizing the need to engage directly and pervasively with the consumer.

Brand Manager vs. Brand Advocate?

Forrester has finally caught up with the leading marketing companies of today!  Forrester published a report recommending the shift from the designation "Brand Manager" to "Brand Advocate" in their report - "Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach To Brands In The Digital Age", here.

I was activitly engaged in creating this new pathway seven years ago at PG-Tremor, details here.  The Advertising Age magazine states as much in their article, "Why its time to do away with the brand manager", here:

"Executives of big marketers Procter & Gamble and Unilever note that they're already doing much of what Forrester recommends.  The global brand strategist/local brand advocate breakdown, for instance, resembles how they and other big household and personal-care marketers already organize."

I remember one of the big moments was when the brand managers discovered they had minimal to no insights on the digital social networks driven communities of choice forming around the "choice" i.e. the brand that fulfilled a need.  The AdAge articles states this to be a necessity today:

"[Rex Briggs] believes marketers in the digital age need to be more "numerate", with more training in research and analytics..."

Interestingly, I remember listening to Paul Poleman current CEO of Unilever when he was at P&G about the importance of information technology in reaching the consumer.  He is quoted in the article stating:

"Web-enabled consumer intelligence may be one of the biggest benefits of social media for marketers."

The astute will note that Mr. Poleman used the words "intelligence" not analytics!

US Gov.'s Consumer - The Citizen - Insight

The Economist discusses "Americans have grown slightly more receptive to the idea of an activist government."  Read complete article here.

The US citizen is the consumer of the US government.  From the consumer insight perspective, I found this graph of value.

Power of Communities of Choice

I continue here with sharing examples of what communities of choice are capable of versus the mystifying term called - wisdom of the crowds.  Please see various examples in my blog on this subject.

The Wired just published an article in their Danger Room that shares methods for internet users who are interested in speaking and acting against the current Iranian regime.  The user can employ simple methods to attack the Iranian governments websites.  See details here.

I find this fascinating - at the same time I see the self organization of such communities of choice to be driving us towards new paradigms of "choice", refining the perception versus reality debate of marketing.  In a perfect world... one would not have to choose!

Communities Of Choice - The Avenue For 21st Century Breakthroughs

I have written consistently and proven the point that there is a myth called wisdom of the crowds. Perhaps it is a marketing term now engulfing the tera-intellect.


An excellent example in the Wired magazine article "There's Power In The Puzzle" here, highlights yet again how the power of communities formed by choice can drive breakthroughs past the imagination of the initiators of the idea for the community. The article discusses a SETI@home like program yet driven from a gamer's perspective, i.e. putting the people in the center of the process. The result is a game called Foldit -

"It simply serves up a multicolored knot of spirals and clumps—a 3-D render of a protein. Players use the cursor to grab, bend, pull, and wiggle the chain of amino acids anywhere along its length, folding the protein into its optimum shape. The only rules are based on physics—opposite charges attract, atomic bonds have limited angles of rotation, and the parts of the molecule that stick to water tend to point outward. The closer your model's properties adhere to those rules, the more points you get."

Yet, the important part of this activity was:

"Working on test proteins for which Baker already knew the structures, folders quickly started to make friends via the in-game chat channel. They shared insights and half-finished puzzles; teams emerged, and collective efforts proved far more successful than any solo folder. A member of the leading team named Jason Kuznicki ... set up a wiki that Popović adopted as Foldit's official manual. "We even built a mini-Facebook for them," he says."

I believe the 21st century is going to be about "communities of choice" driving breakthrough innovation. The internet will continue to flatten the intellectual landscape and making collaboration ubiquitous, where a student who has completed the MIT computer science course work through MIT's open-courseware in Vietnam's low socio-economic class (see excellent article here) can engage in direct scientific analysis with individuals independent of geography.

Note that the winner of the game of Foldit who developed a complex protein is a 13 year old.

Smart Mobs!

Interesting article on communities of choice (not wisdom of crowds) leading the way to collaboratively support each other towards a goal in the article "Smart Mobs, Smarter Puzzles", here authored by Clive Thompson. The article states:

"It's in becoming a neuron in a much bigger intelligence: Finding a piece of evidence, contributing it to the wiki that players inevitably create, and brainstorming with others to figure out what everything means. ARGs could not have existed before the Internet."

One of the best examples of this phenomena is the coupons and discount codes space on the internet that is not corporation or for profit organization driven.

Crowds - Wise?

A good article on The Economist looks at simulating crowds here. It discusses how computational models of crowds is starting to enable more realistic behavior of humans. As an example, the article discusses the behavior of people during a fire blaze.

"The trouble is that the software that is used to do this generally treats people like particles in a fluid, says Mr Wittasek. “It assumes people behave like water flowing through a pipe,” he says. “They move at constant flow rates, heading for the nearest exits. But that’s not realistic.” Human behaviour is in fact far more complex and often quite irrational. When fleeing a fire people will often try to retrace their steps and leave the building by the way they came in, rather than heading for the nearest exit—even if it is much closer."

The article discusses the learning from the film "The Lord of the Rings" - where massive crowds of waring orcs were simulated with each individual orc having an independent brain to make decisions from a predefined set.

Of course, the article has a section labeled "The wisdom of the crowds"! Interestingly the article talks about crowds of humans and animals with examples.

Crowds, Their Self Management - Empirical Data

The Economist writes about "The Kindness of Crowds" with empirical data extracted from CCTV footage in UK here. The conclusions drawn are around crowds, voilence and its self management only.

The point to note is that the data shows crowds alleviating volatile situation through external intervention by a by-stander in most cases. Should the by-stander be considered part of the crowd? I do not think so. A by-stander chooses to help or not help.

Please see my previous post "Debunking "Wisdom of Crowds" Myth - Two Examples" here.