This post continues an arc on online privacy started in Online Privacy, Part 1. This entry brings the history of privacy to focus on websites and modern commerce...
And now, once again, people are browsing your website, picking up your flyer at a kiosk, glancing at your brochure as the walk a showroom or convention floor. They have this belief that they are anonymous and want to remain so.You want and need them to share information about themselves with you, your website, your salespeople.
Most people and especially website visitors believe they are anonymous and actually fall into the next identity level, which is Transitory Identity. Transitory Identity occurs when an individual can be reached through some non-permanent address or tag. A temporary IP is an example of this. The seller can repeatedly touch the individual during the complete lifetime of the encounter, not just the transaction. Imagine someone invisible joining you as you walk in the door and directing other workers to put things in front of and to the side of you as you walk through the store, with the goal of maneuvering you to the checkout aisle with a shopping cart full of useless goodies.
Most website visitors have Transitory Identity. There’s been lots of studies published in the past few years that indicate cookies are deleted, purged, expurgated, dunked in the coffee and milk you picked up at the corner store when you thought you were Anonymous and otherwise gotten rid of. (to be continued...)
(Information in this arc is from Chapter 7, "Experience Versus Expectation" of my next book, Reading Virtual Minds. Text and images copyright Joseph Carrabis and NextStage Evolution 2006-2007)
» Online Privacy, finale from BizMediaScience
Online Privacy, Online Identity and the only web-specific Identity known (to me, anyway) [Read More]
Tracked on: December 8, 2006 8:00 AM | Permalink to Trackback