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Shopper insights has moved quickly across the CPG and retailing landscapes in the past decade as marketers seek to understand the shopper's entire path to purchase and increase sales. From their home (including how they use and view products; advertising media that sparks their interest in new products; how and when they decide where to purchase the product) to the store (including aisle and shelf navigation; product attribute trade-offs; and so on), shoppers are constantly making purchase-related decisions. Shopper insights seeks to holistically comprehend the shopper's environment, surroundings and influences to learn from and capitalize on all of the choices they make along the way.

Paul Greenberg explains it this way in CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers "It is a revolution in how we communicate, not how we do business....We are now living in the era of the social customer.

The traditional

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"With a lot of prodding from the Federal Trade Commission, the Internet advertising industry has committed to telling Web site users about how they collect and use data to customize the ads they display. And it has agreed to find a more prominent and clear way to do this than the cryptic privacy policies you can find if you click a tiny link at the bottom of many Web pages. But how do you communicate something very complex in a way that is clear but doesn't bog down people who just want to check the latest sports scores?"

"Sherry Natoli is followed everywhere she goes while shopping online, but she doesn't mind at all. Natoli, who owns a seashell business in Tampa, does all but her grocery shopping on the Internet and even opts in whenever she's asked whether she's willing to have her online movements tracked by websites." Companies have been monitoring our online behavior for almost as long as there's been an Internet, often using our online footsteps (cookies) whenever we search, browse or buy online. Tracking technology has advanced so much that everything from how long we linger over a product description to whether we are searching for sexual-dysfunction drugs can be collected and stored on individual profiles. Our profiles are numeric descriptions, not our real names, but in some cases, it's not hard to determine personal information behind the numbers. Privacy concerns abound, and several privacy and consumer groups are urging Congress to enact laws on what can and can't be collected and for how long.

As the impact of digital advertising on consumer privacy comes under scrutiny, AT&T is taking a stance in support of stricter standards. Rep. Rick Boucher (D., Va.), chairman of the subcommittee, said in an interview Wednesday that a statute is needed to regulate how companies collect, share and use data on consumers' behavior in targeting online advertising. While ad targeting on the Web has been at the forefront of privacy advocates' concerns, worries are growing about other media, ranging from mobile phones to emerging TV technologies. To sell marketers targeted ads, technology and media companies collect data about customers, ranging from the Web sites they visit to the neighborhoods they live in to the TV shows they watch. Marketers often will pay a premium for this form of advertising because it allows them to show their ads to consumers who are likelier to buy their products or services. "Pitfalls arise because behavioral advertising in its current forms is largely invisible to consumers," says Dorothy Attwood, AT&T's senior vice president of public policy and chief privacy officer, in prepared testimony she is expected to deliver at the hearing of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. Her statement says consumers don't fully understand that their online activity is used to create detailed profiles of them. Internet and other media companies say the data they use to target ads are anonymous and can't be traced to individual consumers. AT&T plans to argue that consumers should have "full and complete" notice of what information is collected about them and how it is used and protected, and should have tools that let them determine whether their Web activities are being tracked. The company says it won't use consumer information for online behavioral advertising unless it first obtains consent from the consumers involved. AT&T's stance contrasts with the position taken by most big Internet companies and industry trade grou

The Homeland Security Department's privacy office will hold a conference to explore the use of social media as if affects security and privacy. The "Government 2.0: Privacy and Best Practices" conference will be held June 22 to June 23 in Washington and is open to the public. The workshop is meant to help agencies use Web 2.0 technologies in ways to protect privacy and security, and to explore the best practices for implementing President Barack Obama's memo on open government that was released in January, according to a notice published in the federal register April 17. Panelists will discuss topics such as transparency and participation in government, privacy and legal concerns brought by the government's use of social media, and how the government can best use the technologies while protecting privacy rights during the conference, DHS officials said. DHS is asking for comments by June 1 on topics such as: * How the government is using social media. * The risks, benefits and operational concerns that come from government use of the technologies. * Privacy, security and legal issues raised by the government's use of social media. * Recommendations on best practices for government use of the technologies.

There is an old axiom in marketing circles that it costs more money to acquire new customers than to retain and service your old ones. In this precarious financial environment, the focus for many companies is now on keeping the existing customers satisfied, rather than worrying only about adding new ones to the fold. Since the business environment has slowed for now, showing your clients additional "value added" services rather than simply a lower price, for example, will be critical. Companies should be taking an introspective look for differentiating factors in the areas of security and privacy "value," and how they can leverage what they uncover - a competitive advantage. How can an organization best position their privacy and security programs to be used as a competitive advantage? First, of course, you need to ensure that your privacy and security program is robust, well-tested, formally documented and meets or exceeds whatever legislation that your company is subject to or regulated against. It is also important to give your customers a point of reference about the validity of your programs so they easily translate the value into a currency they recognize. Further, you should take advantage of any other internal and external audits, assessments and oversights that you can reasonably share with external parties by crafting the results of these documents as a consumable for external parties. It has been my experience that clients, especially their security teams, really appreciate this effort. Another innovative way to deliver a competitive advantage today is in the realm of vendor management. This discipline is quickly becoming an increasingly high-profile topic of discussion and interest between clients, customers and their service providers. The onus is on you anyway to demonstrate oversight of your third-party service provider(s). This is where you should also have the "value add" conversation and validate why your clients placed their trus

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The reality of any new technology, security or otherwise, rarely lives up to its promise. Once you move past the bright sheen of the product brochures and top-level user interfaces, only the practicalities of implementing the product in the real world remain. This is especially true of newer technologies we have little prior experience with, where our product expectations are defined by marketing, the press, and the rare peer reference. It's only after these tools are tested in the real world, under full production conditions, that we really start learning how to either best implement them, or kick them back to the vendor for a little more polish (and a compelling business use). Data loss prevention (DLP) is one of the most promising, and least understood, security technologies to emerge during the last few years. It dangles promises of ubiquitous content protection before our eyes, with shadows of complexity and costs glooming over its shoulder. As with everything, the reality is somewhere in-between. We've interviewed dozens of DLP users (including our own contacts, random volunteers and vendor references) to find out how DLP works in the trenches of the real world. The result is a collection of lessons learned and use cases to help you avoid common pitfalls while deriving maximum value. Lesson 1: Users are confused by a confusing market Lesson 2: Full DLP solutions take more effort to deploy, but are more effective and easier to manage Lesson 3: Set the right expectations and workflow early Lesson 4: Poor identity management hinders good DLP Lesson 5: False positives are a manageable concern Lesson 6: Progressive deployments are most effective Lesson 7: Endpoint DLP is still more limited than network or discovery Lesson 8: Content discovery is hot

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As health care providers determine how they will take advantage of the $19 billion allocated in the stimulus package to help jumpstart advances in health information technology (HIT), consumer appetite for electronic health records (EHRs), online tools and services is also growing, according to the results of the 2009 Deloitte Survey of Health Care Consumers (www.deloitte.com/us/2009consumersurvey). While only 9 percent of consumers surveyed have an electronic personal health record (PHR), 42 percent are interested in establishing PHRs connected online to their physicians. Fifty-five percent want the ability to communicate with their doctor via email to exchange health information and get answers to questions. Fifty-seven percent reported they'd be interested in scheduling appointments, buying prescriptions and completing other transactions online if their information is protected. Technologies that can facilitate consumer transactions with providers and health plans, like integrated billing systems that make bill payment faster and more convenient, are also appealing to nearly half (47 percent) of consumers surveyed. The survey of more than 4,000 U.S. consumers 18 and over was released today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference held in Chicago. It is the second annual study examining health care consumers' attitudes, behaviors and unmet needs conducted by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions offering health care industry leaders and policymakers a timely look at how health care consumerism is evolving. "Consumers are increasingly embracing innovations that enhance self-care, convenience, personalization and control of personal health information," said Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., executive director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. "Consumers want a bigger say in their health care decisions. Consumer demand for HIT and its potential impact on reforming the system has never been stronger." Despite strong con

The Senate and House appear headed for a clash over competing visions of how to protect the privacy of patients' electronic medical records, with the House favoring strict protections advocated by consumer groups while the Senate is poised to endorse more limited safeguards urged by business interests. President Obama has called creation of a nationwide system of electronic medical records fundamental to health-care reform, and both chambers of Congress have included about $20 billion to jump-start the initiative as part of their stimulus bills. But as with much in the stimulus package, it is not just the money but the accompanying provisions that groups are trying to influence. The effort to speed adoption of health information technology has become the focus of an intense lobbying battle fueled by health-care and drug-industry interests that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and tens of millions more on campaign contributions over the past two years, much of it shifting to the Democrats since they took control of Congress. At the heart of the debate is how to strike a balance between protecting patient privacy and expanding the health industry's access to vast and growing databases of information on the health status and medical care of every American. Insurers and providers say the House's proposed protections would hobble efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of health care, but privacy advocates fear that the industry would use the personal data to discriminate against patients in employment and health care as well as to market the information, often through third parties, to generate profits.

The debate on Internet privacy has begun in Congress. I had a chance to sit down recently with Representative Rick Boucher, the long-serving Virginia Democrat, who has just replaced Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, as the chairman of the House Subcommittee looking after telecommunications, technology and the Internet. Mr. Boucher is widely regarded as one of the most technologically savvy members of Congress. As he ticked off his top priorities for his panel, most involved the pressing demands of telecommunications regulation. There is a law governing how local TV stations are carried on satellite broadcasters that needs to be renewed. There is the Universal Service Fund, which takes money from most telephone customers to pay for rural service to be improved. And there is the conversion to digital television and the investments in rural broadband to be supervised. But high on his list is a topic that is very much under his discretion: passing a bill to regulate the privacy of Internet users. "Internet users should be able to know what information is collected about them and have the opportunity to opt out," he said. While he hasn't written the bill yet, Mr. Boucher said that he, working with Representative Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who is the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, wants to require Web sites to disclose how they collect and use data, and give users the option to opt out of any data collection. That's not a big change from what happens now, at least on most big sites.

The Internet Advertising Bureau U.K. has today launched a good practice principles guide for firms that collect and use data for online advertising. The goal is to promote self-regulation of the practice and quell privacy concerns surrounding it. Companies that support the principles include Google, Microsoft Advertising, Platform-A, Yahoo, Specific Media, Audience Science, NebuAd, and Phorm, all of which have been involved in the formation of the principles as members of the IAB's behavioral advertising task force. To complement the guide, the IAB has also launched a consumer-facing site, youronlinechoices.co.uk, designed to educate consumers on how and why their data is being used, and to provide information on how they can opt out of the process if they wish.

I was at an advertising conference last week. Some folks are concerned that privacy advocates will press the government to regulate the most common of tracking technologies: behavioral targeting. That's the system that drops a cookie onto our computers to record many of our wanderings through the Web in hopes of targeting us with relevant ads. I had just written The Next Net, about how we'll be tracked on the mobile Internet. And I was thinking that if behavior targeting worries people, the data cascading from our phone use will terrify them. But there are also plenty of reasons to worry about regulation. First, there's a divide in our society between people extremely worried about erosion of privacy and others who appear, with their Web postings, videos and Tweets, to celebrate it. Which group wins? They both can. Take a look at this new friend-finding location-based application for Facebook, Locaccino. It comes out of Carnegie Mellon. The idea is that people can fine-tune their privacy profiles, deciding who can see where exactly they are, and who gets a blurrier vision, or none at all. The point is that millions of people are clearly eager to exchange all sorts of data. It's a way for them to learn, make friends, find things, and have fun. What's more, it supports a vibrant and innovative software market in a gloom-infested tech industry. Some of the innovation will go toward protecting privacy. Because privacy is something that both sides of this debate want and need, even if they don't agree on what it is. Regulations? The most important privacy regs, in my view, should mandate clear communications on how customer data will be used, and will limit tracking to those who have chosen to participate.

Following on the heels of Facebook's decision to rescind a highly controversial move to store all content posted on the social network, new data has emerged to support consumers' increasing alarm over online privacy. The vast majority--80.1%--of Web surfers are indeed concerned about the privacy of their personal information such as age, gender, income and Web-surfing habits, according to a survey of some 4,000 Web users administered and analyzed by Burst Media. More worrisome, perhaps, is the finding that privacy concerns are prevalent among all age segments, including younger demographics that are coming of age online. Still, privacy concerns do appear to increase with age, from 67.3% among respondents ages 18-24 to 85.7% of respondents 55 years and older. "Online privacy is a prevailing concern for web surfers," said Chuck Moran, vice president of marketing for Burst Media. The survey was administered by Burst with the purpose of better understanding how privacy is impacting Web users' experiences online, as well as its impact on advertisers. "Advertisers must take concrete actions to mitigate consumers' privacy concerns and at the same time continue to deliver their message as effectively as possible," Moran added. "In addition, and as recently seen in the news flare up regarding Facebook's privacy controversy, publishers need to be completely transparent about their privacy policies." Facebook recently changed its terms of use agreement, which gave the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company the ability to store user-posted photos and other content, even after it was deleted by users themselves. Earlier this week, however, the company reverted to a previous version of its legal user guidelines after thousands of members protested that Facebook was claiming ownership over the content. In addition, the Burst survey found that most Web users believe Web sites are tracking their behavior online. Three out of five--62.5%--respondents indicated it is likely that a W

The Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee has offered DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano 16 recommendations on how to best address privacy issues currently facing the department. The panel stressed that "the need to update the government's legal authority to protect and defend cyberspace in the U.S. classified intelligence systems raise specific and sometimes significant privacy issues, including the conflict between transparency and redress." The committee has asked that each DHS component - such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Office of Intelligence and Analysis - have a designated privacy officer that would report to the head of the section. The committee also "encourages DHS to continue to work toward policy and functional interoperability in the development of new systems and when making major modifications to existing systems," according to a letter from the committee hand delivered to Napolitano. Additionally, the panel said the 1974 Privacy Act has "not kept pace with the evolution of technology and developments in how data is collected, used, shared and stored. To the extent the Secretary is asked to submit recommendations to Congress for making the act more relevant and effective, the committee recommends that the secretary seek guidance from the Privacy Office staff, who are experts in applying the Act's provisions throughout the department." For more on the recommendations, read the committee's letter here.

There are three reasons for breach notification laws. One, it's common politeness that when you lose something of someone else's, you tell him. The prevailing corporate attitude before the law - "They won't notice, and if they do notice they won't know it's us, so we are better off keeping quiet about the whole thing" - is just wrong. Two, it provides statistics to security researchers as to how pervasive the problem really is. And three, it forces companies to improve their security. That last point needs a bit of explanation. The problem with companies protecting your data is that it isn't in their financial best interest to do so. That is, the companies are responsible for protecting your data, but bear none of the costs if your data is compromised. You suffer the harm, but you have no control - or even knowledge - of the company's security practices. The idea behind such laws, and how they were sold to legislators, is that they would increase the cost - both in bad publicity and the actual notification - of security breaches, motivating companies to spend more to prevent them. In economic terms, the law reduces the externalities and forces companies to deal with the true costs of these data breaches.

Eight years ago, a woman we'll call Sarah discovered that she was not biologically related to the father she had known all her life. Sarah, her mother revealed, was "donor-conceived." Her parents, after trying without success for a pregnancy of their own in the late 1970s, turned to a fertility center, where Sarah's mother was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor. At the time sperm banks did not offer detailed donor profiles. Upon discovering the truth, Sarah was told what her parents had been told about her biological father: He was a medical student, possibly of Scandinavian ancestry. Sarah, who describes her family as "loving and stable," was shocked. Today she is also sick. A year before finding out about her conception, she began to experience severe, unexplained bladder problems. She has been seeing doctors at Johns Hopkins; so far they haven't figured out the cause. Recently married, Sarah worries that she may pass the illness on to future children. The medical history of her biological father could provide a crucial piece of the diagnostic puzzle. But in the early days of artificial insemination, clinics often shredded or burned files to ensure donor anonymity and client privacy. Sarah's father's identity may be locked away in storage somewhere, or it may have been destroyed. Although aware of the likely futility of her search, Sarah still continues-writing the clinic, nurses, her doctor-in the hope that someone can help. Faced with stories like this, the fertility industry and a few state governments are trying to come up with a way to ensure that future donor-conceived children will have access to their fathers' medical files. A national registry, for example, could allow banks to monitor how many times a man donates semen and how many children are born from his seed, to share updates about medical issues and to facilitate long-term research on health outcomes. But any such registry poses a threat to the p

Still think that today's computer viruses and other malware come from some maladjusted teen out to vandalize your PC to make a name for himself? Think again. The persistent myth is a holdover from days long gone, and it's important to dispel it if you want to know what you're up against-and how to protect yourself. The splashy worms and malicious viruses that clogged entire networks and indiscriminately wiped hard drives are essentially gone. Today, it's all about cash-and lots of it. If there's a way to use evil software to make money, whether it means taking over a PC to send pharmacy-advertising spam, or stealing financial logins and credit card info, or even hacking game accounts, it's out there in some form. There's even a thriving online black market that sells everything from software kits to roll-your-own malware to spam services using infected PCs to reams and reams of credit card data stolen by keylogger malware. It's most important to get rid of this myth in order to get rid of the idea that you can usually tell whether you're infected by obvious signs like big pop-ups or suddenly missing files. Malware writers today work to keep infections as quiet as possible for as long as possible so that they can continue to make money. But it's also important to keep in mind that today's online crooks have become very creative in figuring out how to make money with their malware. Stolen Webmail accounts have been used to send messages to the account's contact list asking for money transfers. Popular online games such as World of Warcraft are a huge target, with thieves raiding hacked accounts to sell the items or in-game currency for real money. So don't assume that there's no risk using an untrusted PC as long as you don't log onto your bank.

The software vendor's commissioned research will be revealed during a panel discussion with leaders from the California Office of Privacy Protection, Intel, and MySpace. Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2009, is Data Privacy Day, and to mark the occasion, Microsoft is participating in a panel discussion in San Francisco with privacy experts from the California Office of Privacy Protection, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Intel (NSDQ: INTC), and MySpace. Better this week than last, when Heartland Payment Systems and Monster.com disclosed major malware-driven data breaches that promise privacy headaches or worse for affected account holders. It is such incidents that worry Peter Cullen, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s chief privacy strategist, because of the impact they can have on consumer trust. "Trust is becoming increasingly important," he said. That's why Data Privacy Day exists. Microsoft and other organizations recognize that without trust, the online economy only gets worse for everyone. Cullen explained that Data Privacy Day represents a global opportunity for organizations and individuals to come together to discuss how to better educate consumers about data privacy issues. One way to advance the discussion, Cullen said, was to commission some research, which Microsoft did in two cities, in California and Texas. "We wanted to understand how different segments of consumers, from teens to professionals to boomers, thought about privacy," he said. "There were some rather interesting results that came out of this." "Our hypothesis is that across these three segments, there would be different ways of thinking about these things," said Cullen. "We were really surprised to learn there's a large degree of similarity in the way people think about privacy."