Digital data collection sets off bad vibrations
OPINION: I’m currently in the process of building out a commercial team, as we seek to push on to the next level of growth in a tech company I’m involved in.
This has seen much of the past two weeks involved in advertising for and interviewing of applicants.
Because the company is still early stage and I’m pretty tightfisted, I’m doing it myself with the help of the two big online job boards.
A recruitment consultant acquaintance chided me for not using his services and gave me a staunch warning against Googling candidates or harvesting social media to check them out.
Specifically, he warned me that I would fall foul of the Privacy Act by accessing data without the candidates’ authorisation.
Data of a more intimate nature than Google can provide was the subject of a recent court case in the United States.
It involved Canadian sex toy manufacturer Standard Innovation, which manufactures personal vibrators under the brand We-Vibe.
The We-Vibe 4 Plus is a product designed for digitally enabled couples who want to ‘‘play together even when they’re apart’’.
Thanks to the cyber voodoo of Bluetooth and wi-fi technology, this meant one person could be wearing the We-Vibe vibrator while their partner controlled its ‘‘vibratory experience’’ by phone.
I won’t go into too much biometric detail here; I’m sure you get the idea.
It turned out that Standard Innovation customers – some 300,000 of them – were getting stimulated in more ways than one. The devices were sending personal information back to the company’s servers.
Standard Innovation, which had access to everything from vibration levels to location and email addresses, would analyse the information so it could use that data ‘‘to improve products and for diagnostic purposes’’. The mind boggles.
Two women discovered this and took a class action against the firm which recently settled for US$5.7 million (NZ$8.1m). Customers will received up to US$500 later.
My mate Iain has had a similar sort of experience, albeit without the frontline biometrics. Iain’s a big-city lawyer with a booming baritone voice and a ready smile.
He’s also happily married with a couple of kids, and a wife who’s way smarter than him.
Like about 500,000 other New Zealanders, Ian uses Google’s excellent and free Gmail platform for email and document storage. Of course it’s not free at all.
More to the point, to quote Larry Lessig, ‘‘if you don’t pay for the product then you are the product’’.
In other words, Gmail is monetised by selling targeted advertising based on the content of your emails which is analysed by a complex set of sampling algorithms. Sometimes they don’t get the cocktail quite right.
In Iain’s case, it’s spent the last few months notifying him of ‘‘horny housewives’’ apparently living nearby.
The great Google algorithm in the digital cloud now reckons Iain is a fat, bald diabetic with toe fungus.
Thankfully this seemed to stop about a month ago – a relief to Iain, not to mention his wife.
The problem is that the great Google algorithm in the digital cloud now reckons Iain is a fat, bald diabetic with toe fungus – offering him up a variety of appropriate therapies.
It’s also pretty sure he’s impotent and needs to get rid of herpes simplex one.
Iain assures me that none of these assumptions is true, particularly not the toe fungus.
Talking of assumptions that aren’t true, my recruitment consultant friend was fundamentally wrong.
Or more likely, he was simply trying to peddle his services by generating unwarranted fear of falling afoul of privacy regulation.
You can go nuts Googling job applicants and finding out about them on LinkedIn or Facebook.
What you can’t do is approach a job applicant’s nominated referees without their permission, or tell others that the person is looking for a new job. This is expressly covered by the Privacy Act 1993.
But the flipside of this harvesting of publicly available information is some degree of healthy scepticism.
Not everything that Google will reveal about a person is necessarily true, so you should seek to verify it and/or check it with the person involved. Particularly if it involves toe fungus. Just ask my mate Iain.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is an e-commerce manager and professional director. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he can be a bit sceptical of recruitment consultants.