Charlie Rose asks Marissa Mayer at Google about who owns their data. full story at TechCrunch.
Marissa Mayer:
Innocently, your credit card company knows a lot what you do. I was reading an article just the other day that said your credit card company knows two years beforehand that you?re going to get divorced with 98 percent likelihood.
Charlie Rose:
And what is it ?
Marissa Mayer:
And how is that possible?
Charlie Rose:
Well, yeah, you tell me.
Marissa Mayer:
Probably you don?t even know, right?
Charlie Rose:
No, no, but before you leave that, what are the indications that they pick up on, the kind of products you buy?
Marissa Mayer:
Probably the kind of purchases, stuff like that so ? so there?s probably some good indicators, but they obviously have enough interest in this because they might make you a credit risk.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
Marissa Mayer:
But it?s really interesting to know that probably most people don?t even know a year beforehand that ?
Charlie Rose:
So what, do you think they have an obligation to tell us so that we can get ready? I?m not married, but ?
Marissa Mayer:
Maybe. Maybe not. But I mean, I think that it is a phenomenon that we?re currently living in right now, that there?s a huge amount of data out there about people, be it with their ISP, with their credit card company, phone company, with their search engine. And we really need a lot of transparency, a lot of user choice available there to really help people manage that.
While the privacy issues make me shudder, this is fascinating! What exactly can we learn about people from what they do online and off and how can that be applied to online dating? What if credit card companies mined purchases and buying trends to create a more thorough profile of a person which could be shared with dating sites? Visa isn’t going to start a dating site anytime soon, but can you imagine?
