BrandLife Tracking And WON

Who Is Watching the Watchers?

Research giant Harris Interactive is jumping into measuring social media. In and of itself, that’s just great. And looking at their information about BrandLife Tracking brings a little concern.

Consider this quote:

“BrandLife Tracking is powered by Harris’ proprietary Research Lifestreaming (R), an innovative platform that gives you access to non-public posts — which make up 85% of online conversations — on the world’s best-known social-media sites.”

Somehow I don’t get a whole lot of warm and fuzzies when I see nonpublic posts as something nonprivate. Yes, I understand anonymous and aggregate. This is something Google does, for its AdSense. It also uses the same technology in Gmail.

What I don’t see from Harris interactive that I do see from Google is that word called transparency. Google may sometimes have a difficult moment explaining itself.

I don’t see where Harris interactive and it’s WON (Word of Network) is being real transparent about where and how it collects data.

I probably seem like some sort of paranoid lunatic. I’m not real big on putting my real life in Facebook or anywhere else. Seeing that Harris could somehow get to my nonpublic thoughts has done nothing to reduce my paranoia.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris_BrandlifeTrackingWON_Overview.pdf

Short URL: http://www.trcbnews.com/?p=7080

Posted by Tcat Houser on Dec 28 2011. Filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry