How concerned should we be about data collection?

In the movie Se7en, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman got a big clue on the identity of the killer by looking at library records for people who have borrowed both religious books and books on torture and serial murderers. Once your book-reading records are viewable, it's fairly easy for others to profile your interest. And once your interest is profiled, somebody may go one step further in profiling you as a person.

The New York Times posted this article last week:  To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You

A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.

Although the practice of internet data collection for targeted advertising is not new, the technology is getting more and more sophisticated to the point where the collected data may be traceable to the individual. With cookies being implemented in a lot of web sites, it's easy for internet advertising companies to track your browsing and searching habits and use this information to profile and target you later. Yes, there are ways to block your activities from being collected by internet advertising companies. The Adblock extension for Firefox browser is one option that I personally use. But in a bigger picture, blocking advertising is not the solution. Advertising is a very big reason why the internet is experiencing phenomenal growth in the last few years.

Handling of collected data is a serious concern. There is no mechanism implemented to ensure that only aggregate (and not personal) data is accessible to the company that collect them. In some countries like Indonesia, for example, there is no law whatsoever on internet data privacy. Above all, consumer awareness is key. Most people are not aware what information about them is being collected, let alone provide consent.

Yet another point to think about is the accuracy of data interpretation for the purpose of target marketing. I'll leave you with an old joke:

A young guy goes to a checkout counter in a local supermarket with one can of beer, one box of frozen dinner, one pack of Marlboro, one carton of milk, one bag of potato chips and an issue of Playboy. The cute girl behind the counter is ringing this stuff up and asks him, “Single, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Is it because I'm buying one of everything?”

“No. Because you’re ugly.”

Social Networking Popularity Around The World

Here's a partial map depicting the popularity of social networking sites around the world. The full picture can be found at this Le Monde web site.

You can barely see Singapore, but I believe Le Monde is saying that Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are owned by Friendster. Interesting. Although I think this is accurate, from what I see in the three countries, the trend is definitely moving towards Facebook.

Update 3 March 2008: Via the Buzz Out Loud podcast episode 670, here is a more detailed version of the social network popularity map.

Technorati Tags: internet,socialnetworking

What's up N*G*A!!

I got an email from Bank Niaga announcing their soon-to-be redesigned web page. The new design seems a bit... ummm... hip-hop. The new design will be introduced on 25 June 2007.

Not satisfied with Jajah

Here is my harsh email to Jajah:

I have given up trying to use Jajah for my international calls. Since I managed to upload funds to my account on 11 April, I have tried numerous times making calls from Indonesia to Singapore and Australia with Jajah. Jajah has never once able to make that connection. My phone never rang. Never. Even after my account was charged for the attempted calls.
And to think of all the inconveniences I had to go through to set up my account. Jajah would not accept credit card payment from me (the option was grayed out in the web page) and my only option was bank transfer. But Jajah does not have a bank account in my country (Indonesia) so I had to make an overseas transfer. This cost me US $10 of bank fees -- money that I hoped I could get back in terms of cost savings. Well, the web site says that Jajah has saved me USD 3.87 so far, but this is a lie. Jajah has saved me nothing and instead took money from my account for calls that were never connected.
I am very disappointed.

Jajah responded by crediting my account, but they didn't give any explanation why the technical problem occurred. I assume their servers were overloaded and couldn't make the connection in an acceptable time. I wonder if this problem happens in other parts of the world -- I'm sure Indonesia is not their primary target market.

I am now using Telkom's prefix 01017 to call Mina in Singapore. The promotion rate is Rp. 990 per minute (about US$ 0.10) to selected countries, including Singapore. I believe the rate is valid until end of May 2007. After that I may go back to Skype Out. I just hope Skype improves the drop call rate -- I usually need to call Mina 2 or 3 times to complete a 10-minute conversation.

I've just become a customer of Audible

First of all, I love e-books and I wish all printed books have their e-book equivalents. I love the instant gratification that comes with purchasing an e-book: Being able to read it seconds after deciding which one to buy. Anybody in Indonesia who has done an online purchase can testify that it's a risky business dealing with the Indonesian postal service. You can only hope that on the day your stuff is supposed to be delivered, the mail man does not decide to keep it for himself. But to me the best thing about an e-book is the fact that I can always have it with me and that it's always available for me to read (I keep my e-books in my smartphone that I carry with me all the time).

Earlier today a friend recommended a book called "Zen and the Art of Making a Living" by Laurence G. Boldt. Rushing to Amazon.com I discovered that no e-book version is available. Fortunately an audio version is available through Audible.com.

I actually liked audiobooks. Before the age of internet and e-books, I had a number of audiobooks in my library. I found that audiobooks were easier on my ears than printed books on my eyes. Since I didn't have much choice on this book that my friend recommended and since I really wanted to read it, I decided to give Audible a try and signed up.

I think the first time I visited Audible.com was many months ago, when Ricky Gervais decided to move his podcast show there. I remember I wasn't too impressed by Audible then. However I think they've done a good job with their web site and offerings and it's much more attractive now. If you're mainly interested in the mainstream bestseller books (e.g. NY Times' or Business Week's list), Audible's selection is also better than the e-books offered by Fictionwise.com or Mobipocket.com. I signed up for their Gold Monthly membership. It's $7.49/month for the first three months ($14.95/month afterwards) and you get a free audiobook every month plus 30% discounts on other books. On a technical note, my Indonesian credit card was accepted without problem. Instructions for software download and all other technical matters are presented in idiot-proof.

SkypeOut Frustration - Conclusion

Three working days after I tried a bank transfer, I finally got SkypeOut credit in my account. A full EUR 10 was deposited in my Skype account. Finally!

So, for Indonesians, here is the bottom line for purchasing credits with Skype:

• Choose the bank transfer option when purchasing credit at Skype's web site. Skype will give a detailed instruction to send the funds to an account at a HSBC Indonesia branch.
  • If you have an online account with HSBC, go to HSBC's online banking web site and make a fund transfer.
  • For any other banks, go to your respective online banking site to see if an inter-bank transfer is possible.
  • Else, you must physically go to your bank and do a funds transfer.
• Any other payment method with Skype will fail. This includes credit card, debit card and PayPal.

SkypeOut Frustration

In my moment of weakness, I could spend hours and hours trying to fix something that is advertised to work but doesn't. In the last few days I must have spent countless of hours banging my head against the wall trying to buy SkypeOut credit using anything except physically going to a bank to make a funds transfer.

It all started when Mina moved to Singapore and I found myself spending a lot of money making international calls. That's when I looked to Skype to remedy this situation. At first I tried to purchase SkypeOut credit using my credit card. However, due to Indonesia's notoriety in online transactions, even my platinum Citibank Visa got rejected. Of course Skype won't admit that this was the reason behind the rejected transaction, but it's publicly known that credit cards issued in Indonesia have very low credibility in the e-commerce world.

Then I discovered that PayPal is now offered for Indonesian residents. Of course this is old news (shame on me), as apparently PayPal entered the Indonesian market since October of 2006. I thought this was awesome as it would surely allow me to get those pesky SkypeOut credits now. But I was wrong for the second time.

Skype evidently has some reservations about Indonesian PayPal users as the PayPal payment option does not even show up from the purchase screen. This was after I registerd my PayPal account on Skype. I even tried to trick Skype by signing up for PayPal auto-recharge which would automatically make PayPal purchase if my SkypeOut credit falls below 2 Euros. None of this efforts worked.

Not willing to give up, I tried other ways to purchase SkypeOut credits. Next, I tried my Bank BII Master Card debit card. I thought a debit card would give more credibility in this type of transaction. I was proven wrong again as this card was rejected like a nerd on prom night.

My last desperate effort was to go Moneybookers.com. Apparently Moneybookers is the second biggest online payment behind PayPal. Except for having to go through the ugly brown web site, the sign up process was similar to PayPal's. Unfortunately, the conclusion was the same as well. I fared even worse than PayPal as Moneybookers even failed my credit card verification. No reason was given. Just plain rejection.

At this point I'm ready to throw in the towel. And by that I mean dragging my ass to a local HSBC bank where Skype has an Indonesian bank account via Global Collect. At the last minute, I opened my KlikBCA account to see if they offer any service that could help. Unbeknownst to me, KlikBCA now offers a way to transfer to other banks. I don't even know when they started to offer this service! I typed in the purchase amount and now it's a waiting game . I should know in 4-5 days and will put an update if this method works.

Learning to value Social Bookmarking tools

When David Filo and Jerry Yang first started Yahoo on a campus trailer in 1994, they could list the whole internet on a few web pages. Now, any 13 year old has a thousand of web bookmarks he needs to manage.
My first experience with bookmark web sites was with Yahoo's own. It was quite adequate for many years -- or at least I think it was adequate -- until Furl and del.icio.us brought new ideas to the game. To me, it was not the idea of sharing my bookmarks that mattered the most. The main advantages of such Social Bookmarking tools are (compared to Yahoo's old-fashioned bookmarking tool) for me are:

• It makes more sense to save web "pages" (articles, blog entries, etc.) in Social Bookmarking sites rather than old-fashioned bookmarking tool. For example, http://www.newsweek.com can be saved in an old-fashioned bookmark. But an article about avian flu in Newsweek.com should be saved in a Social Bookmarking tool.
• You can easily create tags or notes to the bookmark to clearly explain what the web site is about
• In the case of Furl, it keeps a copy of the web page, in case the original web site goes down or goes out of business

Since mid-2004, I started keeping entries in Furl. As of this blog entry's writing, I have 654 bookmarks in it. I still keep my Yahoo bookmarks because I wanted to keep "home" pages of web sites (www.google.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.) separate from articles and blog entries I keep in Furl. On last count, my Yahoo bookmarks has 600+ entries in it and keeping them within the (numerous levels of) folders are beginning to be quite a hassle. That is why I am now revisiting other methods/tools for keeping my bookmarks.
After evaluating a number of bookmarking tools out there, I can sum them up thusly:

• Yahoo Bookmarks. Cons: Simply put: not sexy. Needs the bloated Yahoo Toolbar to take advantage of.
• Chipmark is a Yahoo Bookmarks clone. Pros: doesn't need Yahoo Toolbar. Cons: Saving bookmarks is constrained to the folder hierarchy, so you cannot have multiple tags to a bookmark (i.e. old-fashioned bookmarking).
• Furl. Pros: Saves a copy of the bookmarked web page. Cons: Interface is a bit clunky -- it takes multiple clicks to attach new tags to a bookmark.
• Yahoo My Web 2.0. Pros: Easy to have multiple tags to a bookmark. Easy import from Yahoo Bookmarks. Integration with other Yahoo services. Cons: Plain-looking. No easy way to import 654 bookmarks from Furl. Bulk edit can be improved.
• Del.icio.us. Pros: Multiple tags to a bookmark. A gazillion tools/extensions available to enhance usability and user experience. Cons: Ugly-looking. Doesn't save a copy of the web page. No easy way to import from Furl.
• Blinklist. Pros: Nice looking. Multiple tags to a bookmark. Easy to import from Furl and Yahoo Bookmarks. Cons: Doesn't save a copy of the web page.

At this point I have imported my bookmarks from Yahoo and Furl to Blinklist. However, because Blinklist doesn't create copies of web pages, I'm also keeping my bookmarks at Furl (I know, it sucks). What I'm really hoping is for Google to start getting serious in this area and enhance their own bookmarking tool (e.g. have an import feature, to start with). With its integration to the rest of Google service, it would certainly be kick-ass.