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05 september Opting out of pre-screened cardsIt is not often that one encounters good news on the junk snail-mail front. Credit card companies send large amounts of mail, blanketing mail boxes with pre-approved credit card offers as part of aggressive "customer acquisition" campaigns. Aside from wasting paper, this practice provides would-be identity thiefs with great wealth of material. Typically these letters can not be discarded, they have to be shredded. (For extra caution, using a cross-cut shredder as strip shredders are not particularly effective as the US learned during the Iranian embassy occupation. There is even a DoD standard for the maximum allowable size of the confetti after the blades are done grinding.) Increasingly the offers even provide web-approval options, with authorization codes printed on the page. There was always an opt-out option for these mailings, accessible via phone at 1-888-5-OPT-OUT as well as on the web at OptoutPrescreen, a fancy named website that is run by an alliance of the 3 major credit reporting bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. This process is great for user choice, but a privacy advocate might ask why it is opt-out in the first place, instead of opt-in where the default assumption is that customers are interested in receiving these offers. There is also the quirk that a temporary 5-year opt-out can be accomplished on the web, but permanent opt-out requires printing and mailing the form-- guaranteed to steer most visitors to the five-year option because of the added inconvenience. All opt-out options involve providing social security number, which may give users another reason for pause. Granted this process has been in existence for some time. good news is that recent crop of prescreened offers are now advertising the opt-out option, which solves the greatest problem: consumers are not aware that they can opt-out, instead of making confetti out of junk mail regularly. cemp 16 augustus Data mining: beer, diapers and mythsTaking a break from discussion of privacy features in standard web browsers, here is a detour into data mining land. This newsletter from 2002 discusses the origins of the story that some large retailer discovered using data-mining that people who buy diapers are very likely to buy beer as part of the same purchase. The story is often recounted in different contexts and tweaked to serve different agendas. (Depending on the speaker, this anecdote could be a tribute to the power of data mining, the unexpected and far-from-intuitive patterns hiding in consumer shopping behavior or another sign of privacy under attack from increased computing power.) From what Daniel Power concludes, the true story is not quite as dramatic. It is traced to early 1990s and Osco Drugs (still operating in the Midwest) which contracted Teradata to examine customer purchases and identify patterns. During this study, one suprise the team uncovered was "between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. [...] consumers bought beer and diapers." Contrary to most renditions of the story, the store did not change the location of these items to encourage impulse purchases. cemp 09 augustus Guest wireless access on campusFinally our Redmond campus offers guest wireless access. The 802.11g here is second-to-none but until recently required EAP-TLS authentication. Those X509 certificates were automatically provisioned on domain-joined machines, after logging into the redmond domain from a LAN connection. When the time of expiration approaches, they are automatically renewed. This works very well, provided your machine is joined to the domain. On a laptop that was not joined, it is very difficutl to connect. After trying all types of work arounds-- including running a domain joined virtual machine, which didn't work because the VM did not have control over host wireless card to authenticate-- the solution arrived unexpectedly in the form of IT department providing guest wireless starting in July. Hopping on the network requires getting username/password from the reception but otherwise works reliably. cemp 08 juli Google Checkout launches and eBay promptly bans itMuch awaited Google Checkout went live in the last week of June with much fanfare, some skepticism and a quiet announcement by eBay signalling that the auction giant is serious about protecting its own turf. Good news is that Google is serious in building a platform by attracting both buyers and sellers. The chicken-egg problem for getting traction on a new payment system involves building both a compelling array of ecommerce merchants willing to integrate the system and a compelling size of consumers capable of using the currency. Unless their favorite websites offer the new checkout option, consumers will not bother signing up for one more service, the argument runs. And unless a sizable fraction of potential customers can pay using this new scheme, retailers are not going to invest in supporting one more option. This is a daunting boot-strapping challenge. On the positive side, it is also a virtuous cycle, a positive feedback loop where more customers attract more merchants and they in turn create incentives for other consumers to jump on the bandwagon. Crossing the chasm from no-no to the self-sustaining growth requires artifical incentives, when the payment platform initially subsidizes adoption potentially at a loss. (At least one critic called the strategy predatory pricing in the case of Google.) Incentives are plenty here. The offering launched in collaboration with Citibank is going live with heavy-hitters out of the gate including Buy.Com, Starbucks and uBid, including discount coupons for using GC as the payment option. For merchants Google slighly underprices Mastercard to create an incentive for at least featuring the new offering side-by-side with the conventional payment card solutions. But one critical merchant that Google Checkout is unlikely to win over is eBay. Paypal and eBay enjoyed a symbiotic relationship over the years, with Paypal providing the convenient payment option for peer-to-peer payments for small ticket items listed on the acution website. In a rare blunder, eBay attempted to introduce its own payment currency at one point, only to back pedal after users virtually mutinied. The logical followed and eBay acquired Paypal. PayPal has the first-mover advantage for online payments. It has no serious competition except for risky, niche markets such as online gambling where the company, already under fire from regulators, has been wise not to participate. Question for Google: without the benefit of a "killer application" such as eBay, can the new Checkout service achieve critical mass? cemp |
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