Internet of Behaviors (IoB), scary or useful?
Companies like to know a lot about us. After all, the more they know about us, the more they can sell to us. Internet of Behaviors serves them at their beck and call.
Contents
The ideal, or nightmare, of Internet Of Behaviours
Suppose you get up and walk into the kitchen. The grocery delivery service has delivered the last shipment of provisions, with a new, more expensive type of brie. That fits better with your customer profile, the delivery service thinks, because you have just been promoted.
Then, with a cup of coffee on the sofa, you watch a short sports news on the TV, interrupted by advertisements for exclusive golf balls. Because after your promotion to chief controller you will spend a lot of time on the golf course, the AI of the ad network estimates. Once in your car, you will receive an app from the lease company. Whether you are not interested in the new Lexus. They have an attractive offer in the luxury segment especially for you.
science fiction? Still, but this is where some big companies want to go. Internet of Behaviors is one thing and will become more and more important.
What is Internet of Behaviours?
We leave a digital trail in everything we do via the internet or smart devices. With Google Maps you can see exactly which routes you have followed because you always carry your personal beacon, your smartphone, with you. Your orders at webshops, your contacts and calling and app behaviour, which sites you visit, who you date via apps like Tinder, what time you get up and what time you go to sleep.
For a marketer, all this is very valuable information. Especially if this information can be linked to a neural network to discover patterns. But until recently, this information was all stored in a fragmentary way. That is now increasingly changing. Especially in countries where data protection is poorly regulated.
Internet of Behaviors is what emerges. It is the cloud of data that you generate in your daily digital existence, linked together and therefore incredibly powerful. On the one hand, it is convenient. Your life runs smoothly and on autopilot. On the other hand, this also entails a number of dangers.
The omniscient business
The first drawback is that companies know more about you than you know yourself. The balance of power between you as a consumer and large companies has definitely tipped towards that company. Notorious, for example, is the case described in Forbes of the angry father of a teenage daughter, who suddenly received test samples and offers of baby items from the American chain Target. Outraged, he called the chain. How did they come to talk his teenage daughter into motherhood?
Based on her changing buying habits, Target’s sales manager had determined that there was a good chance that she would develop an interest in baby products, as other women had been before. A few days later, the angry father called again. This time to apologize. His daughter turned out to be pregnant.
This happened in 2012, when artificial intelligence was much less developed than it is today. Now these problems have become many times bigger.
Unconscious influence
A second disadvantage is that it becomes so much easier to nudge people: to steer their behavior in a desired direction without them realizing it.
Cambridge Analytica, an American company that focuses on this, succeeded in 2016 in getting large numbers of voters to vote for Donald J. Trump. And to discourage other voters, for example blacks from poor neighborhoods who would otherwise vote for the opposing candidate Hillary Clinton, from voting.
By cleverly playing on demographic characteristics of Facebook users with targeted ads, the Trump campaign team succeeded in translating the prevailing discontent among many Americans into a resounding election victory.
But you can also influence purchasing behavior in this way. Or, for example, changing people’s habits to make them drive past your mall more often. Often this is not in the interest of these people.
But maybe there is a way out. A way to ensure that our lives get better.
Educate yourself voluntarily with the Internet of Behaviour
Suppose you have a few bad habits that you would like to get rid of, or you want to develop more good habits. Then it is technically possible to have an AI help you with that. Consider, for example, the popular language app Duolingo. It uses gamification techniques, often misused to drive gamers addicted, to ensure you master a language.
You could have the AI take a closer look at your entire lifestyle and ensure that you eat less, exercise more and develop yourself, for example. For example, become more successful in your work or in love. But at the moment there are hardly any such applications, because they yield too little. Unhappy, shopaholic people can earn much more than happy people. That’s too bad.
