The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About (Today's worth?)
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015 U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more. Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls. SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit. There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates. WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said. The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations. "It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending. *Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members. The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said. "If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom." Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks. The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms. Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers. But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side. When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits. Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email. AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added. Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar. *Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background. "The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers. Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties." Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known. SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365. "The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't." http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-data-business-telco...
*Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services * g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you* for the purposes below: …. (ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities; https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Conditions/conditions... ---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....* for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok! On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
*Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
*Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24- billion-data-business-telcos-discuss/301058/
Alex This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice. This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up? Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113 Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you for the purposes below: …. (ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Conditions/conditions...
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote: The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data
By Kate Kaye. Published on October 26, 2015 U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
Too risky for the E.U.? To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
Why the secrecy? Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-data-business-telco...
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Ali, For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold' Gakuru On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
*Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services *
g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you* for the purposes below:
….
(ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_ Conditions/conditions_of_use_for_the_safaricom_prepaid_services.pdf
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....*
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
*Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
*Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion- data-business-telcos-discuss/301058/
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Alex I think you missed my point. Which basically was this:- In a commercial arrangement one has a choice. In a 'National Security' scenario you simply don't. You go to court. Like Omtata did. In my humble opinion we are in a classic scenario of a Glass Half Full. For those of us who lived in the Pre-Multi Party era these sort of discussions would have landed ALL of us in Nyayo House. The fact that we have these freedoms makes us more determined to protect them. Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113 Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 6:23 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold'
Gakuru
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote: Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you for the purposes below: …. (ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Conditions/conditions...
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote: The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data
By Kate Kaye. Published on October 26, 2015 U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
Too risky for the E.U.? To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
Why the secrecy? Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-data-business-telco...
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Steering off selective amnesia, recall: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/17/mobilephones.observerbusine... On 20 Feb 2017 7:59 pm, "Ali Hussein" <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
I think you missed my point. Which basically was this:-
In a commercial arrangement one has a choice. In a 'National Security' scenario you simply don't. You go to court. Like Omtata did.
In my humble opinion we are in a classic scenario of a Glass Half Full.
For those of us who lived in the Pre-Multi Party era these sort of discussions would have landed ALL of us in Nyayo House. The fact that we have these freedoms makes us more determined to protect them.
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 6:23 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold'
Gakuru
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
*Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services *
g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you* for the purposes below:
….
(ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Condi tions/conditions_of_use_for_the_safaricom_prepaid_services.pdf
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....*
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
*Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
*Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-dat a-business-telcos-discuss/301058/
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Alex Let me add Snowden to that voice. No one is denying the misdeeds of Telcos. In this particular Greek case Vodafone was held accountable. All we are saying is that we need to hold our governments accountable while definitely considering matters of National Security. Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113 Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle Sent from my iPad
On 3 Mar 2017, at 5:00 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Steering off selective amnesia, recall: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/17/mobilephones.observerbusine...
On 20 Feb 2017 7:59 pm, "Ali Hussein" <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote: Alex
I think you missed my point. Which basically was this:-
In a commercial arrangement one has a choice. In a 'National Security' scenario you simply don't. You go to court. Like Omtata did.
In my humble opinion we are in a classic scenario of a Glass Half Full.
For those of us who lived in the Pre-Multi Party era these sort of discussions would have landed ALL of us in Nyayo House. The fact that we have these freedoms makes us more determined to protect them.
Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 6:23 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold'
Gakuru
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote: Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
Ali Hussein Principal Hussein & Associates +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you for the purposes below: …. (ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Conditions/conditions...
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses any details of your use of the Services including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote: The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data
By Kate Kaye. Published on October 26, 2015 U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
Too risky for the E.U.? To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
Why the secrecy? Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-data-business-telco...
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Ali, I am quite pleased with the direction this conversation has now assumed. My in-line responses below, Alex On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 6:23 AM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
Let me add Snowden to that voice.
Fantastic! Adding Hon. Edward Snowden’s insightful revelations of USG-led global surveillance in partnership with multinational and global telecommunications corporations elevates the privacy conversation to the international level it should have been and always analysed through. It is quite exasperating to sit through some local and regional information and communications governance fora only to realise that the discussants and participants are ever so abrasive! mobilising all of their their accusations and condemnations of African governments and their regulators for every ill tormenting consumers and end users of ICTs – while dreadfully muted on anything likely accuse, point to or even suggest the greatest ‘partners in crime’ violating netizens privacy worldwide, the US government together with multinational communications corporations. I hold Hon. Edward Snowden in the highest esteem thus concur 100 per cent with you here.
No one is denying the misdeeds of Telcos. In this particular Greek case
Vodafone was held accountable.
Precisely my point all along! That the posture by Safaricom when breaking this ‘news’ must be thoroughly interrogated to ensure that it was not done to achieve other than its superficial appearance grounded on the guaranteed public panic and outcry it may have been designed to cause. In contrast, imagine there existed some ‘GICTANET’ platform in Greece bashing literally everything ADAE undertook? From spying, incompetence etc.. etc… would their ‘*tarnished*’ independent regulator had succeed in fining Vodafone 170 million Euro? I doubt it. But in Kenya if we all hell-bent in spreading fanatical beliefs that **whatever** CA undertakes is against public interest, then we equally must change the law and all agree to accept and live with the consequences and blame only ourselves thereafter.
All we are saying is that we need to hold our governments accountable while definitely considering matters of National Security.
Agreed! This is everyone’s civic duty in an honest, environment motivated by absolutely nothing else other than protecting the public interest, locally and globally. Devoid of framing the privacy-security conversation as simply public vs government, excusing and or praising commercial interests special groups (telecos, ISP, Internet platforms) and lobbyists from the microscope. Conscious that in the current neoliberal order the individual is under assault from deep pocket corporate interests routinely and progressively buying their way into government to defeat public interest, exploit the public more (aka ‘improve profitability’) all along peddling the good old ‘its just the way capitalism works.’ The truth is, its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor <http://www.other-news.info/2017/03/why-socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor/#more-13165>. Here is leaked telcos research video titled "*The Internet Must Go <http://www.theinternetmustgo.com/movie.php>*" -- a very good example on how this exploitative corporate corruption system works to frustrate internet access to millions of people. Therefore, we should ever happy to read private sector special interest groups groan over effective regulation and study their underlying need instead of *automagically* jumping into never ending regulator dogmatic condemnations.
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 3 Mar 2017, at 5:00 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Steering off selective amnesia, recall: https://www.theguardia n.com/business/2006/sep/17/mobilephones.observerbusiness
On 20 Feb 2017 7:59 pm, "Ali Hussein" <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
I think you missed my point. Which basically was this:-
In a commercial arrangement one has a choice. In a 'National Security' scenario you simply don't. You go to court. Like Omtata did.
In my humble opinion we are in a classic scenario of a Glass Half Full.
For those of us who lived in the Pre-Multi Party era these sort of discussions would have landed ALL of us in Nyayo House. The fact that we have these freedoms makes us more determined to protect them.
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 6:23 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold'
Gakuru
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
*Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services *
g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you* for the purposes below:
….
(ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Condi tions/conditions_of_use_for_the_safaricom_prepaid_services.pdf
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....*
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
*Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
*Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-dat a-business-telcos-discuss/301058/
_______________________________________________ isoc mailing list isoc@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/isoc
Ha! see the attached presentation, but do I say? On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
I am quite pleased with the direction this conversation has now assumed.
My in-line responses below,
Alex
On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 6:23 AM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
Let me add Snowden to that voice.
Fantastic! Adding Hon. Edward Snowden’s insightful revelations of USG-led global surveillance in partnership with multinational and global telecommunications corporations elevates the privacy conversation to the international level it should have been and always analysed through. It is quite exasperating to sit through some local and regional information and communications governance fora only to realise that the discussants and participants are ever so abrasive! mobilising all of their their accusations and condemnations of African governments and their regulators for every ill tormenting consumers and end users of ICTs – while dreadfully muted on anything likely accuse, point to or even suggest the greatest ‘partners in crime’ violating netizens privacy worldwide, the US government together with multinational communications corporations. I hold Hon. Edward Snowden in the highest esteem thus concur 100 per cent with you here.
No one is denying the misdeeds of Telcos. In this particular Greek case
Vodafone was held accountable.
Precisely my point all along! That the posture by Safaricom when breaking this ‘news’ must be thoroughly interrogated to ensure that it was not done to achieve other than its superficial appearance grounded on the guaranteed public panic and outcry it may have been designed to cause.
In contrast, imagine there existed some ‘GICTANET’ platform in Greece bashing literally everything ADAE undertook? From spying, incompetence etc.. etc… would their ‘*tarnished*’ independent regulator had succeed in fining Vodafone 170 million Euro? I doubt it.
But in Kenya if we all hell-bent in spreading fanatical beliefs that **whatever** CA undertakes is against public interest, then we equally must change the law and all agree to accept and live with the consequences and blame only ourselves thereafter.
All we are saying is that we need to hold our governments accountable while definitely considering matters of National Security.
Agreed! This is everyone’s civic duty in an honest, environment motivated by absolutely nothing else other than protecting the public interest, locally and globally. Devoid of framing the privacy-security conversation as simply public vs government, excusing and or praising commercial interests special groups (telecos, ISP, Internet platforms) and lobbyists from the microscope.
Conscious that in the current neoliberal order the individual is under assault from deep pocket corporate interests routinely and progressively buying their way into government to defeat public interest, exploit the public more (aka ‘improve profitability’) all along peddling the good old ‘its just the way capitalism works.’ The truth is, its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor <http://www.other-news.info/2017/03/why-socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor/#more-13165>. Here is leaked telcos research video titled "*The Internet Must Go <http://www.theinternetmustgo.com/movie.php>*" -- a very good example on how this exploitative corporate corruption system works to frustrate internet access to millions of people.
Therefore, we should ever happy to read private sector special interest groups groan over effective regulation and study their underlying need instead of *automagically* jumping into never ending regulator dogmatic condemnations.
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 3 Mar 2017, at 5:00 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Steering off selective amnesia, recall: https://www.theguardia n.com/business/2006/sep/17/mobilephones.observerbusiness
On 20 Feb 2017 7:59 pm, "Ali Hussein" <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
I think you missed my point. Which basically was this:-
In a commercial arrangement one has a choice. In a 'National Security' scenario you simply don't. You go to court. Like Omtata did.
In my humble opinion we are in a classic scenario of a Glass Half Full.
For those of us who lived in the Pre-Multi Party era these sort of discussions would have landed ALL of us in Nyayo House. The fact that we have these freedoms makes us more determined to protect them.
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 6:23 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Ali,
For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither apportioning new and or additional responsibilities to any person. Merely, challenging Safaricom media posture, legitimacy and sincerity as defender of consumers privacy. When clearly evidence proves, if anything, they are protecting own 'exclusive' corporate right to our data? Privacy (or erosion thereof) is far greater than currently being narrowly packaged, presented and 'sold'
Gakuru
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 5:54 PM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Alex
This is great. Thanks for sharing. So, to some extent this is what Terms and Conditions are all about. Much as it's definitely not a perfect scenario these is an 'assumed' acceptance. Which can be challenged in court. There is also a certain 'transparency' and a sort of 'Buyer Beware' notice.
This could be something that the consumer protection agencies can take up?
*Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* +254 0713 601113
Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~ Aristotle
Sent from my iPad
On 20 Feb 2017, at 3:48 PM, Alex Gakuru via isoc <isoc@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:
*Conditions of Use for the Safaricom Prepaid Services *
g. You accept that we may disclose and/or receive and/or record *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you* for the purposes below:
….
(ii) For reasonable commercial purposes connected to your use of the mobile service, such as marketing and research related activities;
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/images/Downloads/Terms_and_Condi tions/conditions_of_use_for_the_safaricom_prepaid_services.pdf
---- We must feel very safe for our consumers privacy caring Safaricom uses *any details of your use of the Services* *including but not limited to your calls, emails, SMS’s, data, your personal information or documents obtained from you ....*
for their "commercial purposes" -- whatever broadly defined those purposes are ok!
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru@gmail.com> wrote:
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About Mobile Carriers Are Working With Partners to Manage, Package and Sell Data By Kate Kaye <http://adage.com/author/kate-kaye/974>. Published on October 26, 2015
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos' real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon <http://adage.com/directory/verizon-communications/289>, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP <http://adage.com/directory/sap/16447>, IBM <http://adage.com/directory/ibm/4762>, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It's all part of a push by the world's largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers' mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.
SAP's Consumer Insight 365 ingests regularly updated data representing as many as 300 cellphone events per day for each of the 20 million to 25 million mobile subscribers. SAP won't disclose the carriers providing this data. It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of SAP's global retail industry business unit.
There is a lot of marketer interest in that information because it is tied to actual individuals. For the same reason, however, there is potential for resistance from privacy advocates.
WPP units such as Kantar Media and GroupM's Mindshare have "kicked the tires" for three years on Consumer Insight 365, testing and helping develop applications for the service, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP's Data Alliance. The extensive time spent so far partly reflects "high sensitivity to not doing something that would be too close for comfort from a consumer point of view," Mr. Nyhan said.
The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations.
"It used to be that this data was a lot harder to come by," said Ross Shanken, CEO of LeadID, a lead generation analytics firm. In a previous position at data firm TargusInfo 2008 and 2010 he nonetheless partnered with "a very large telco" to validate names, addresses and phone numbers for data appending.
*Too risky for the E.U.?* To protect privacy, SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos, and only provides aggregated information to its clients to prevent reidentification of individuals. Still, sharing and using data this way is controversial. Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients. And despite privacy safeguards, SAP is focused on selling its 365 product in North America and the Asia-Pacific region because it cannot get the data it needs from telcos representing consumers in the E.U., where data protections are stricter than in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
The global market for telco data as a service is potentially worth $24.1 billion this year, on its way to $79 billion in 2020, according to estimates by 451 Research based on a survey of likely customers. "Challenges and constraints" mean operators are scraping just 10% of the possible market right now, though that will rise to 30% by 2020, 451 Research said.
"If I was a CEO of any telecom operator in the U.S., I would be saying to myself I can do the same," said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media, which teams up with mobile operators to provide anonymized and aggregated data for targeting digital out-of-home ads based on consumers' comings and goings. "That's going to be something these guys are talking about in the boardroom."
Perhaps the most prominent recent moves in the burgeoning TDaaS realm are Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL <http://adage.com/directory/aol/2727> in May, followed by its purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media <http://adage.com/directory/millennial-media/3111> for $238 million in September. Many saw the AOL buy as a means for Verizon to turn its data into a viable business, in part because AOL provides ad-tech infrastructure and marketer relationships that Verizon lacks.
The level of authenticated information derived from Verizon and other mobile operators is seen as potentially more valuable than some other consumer data because it directly connects mobile phone interactions to individuals through actual billing information. "We're talking about linking a household and a billing relationship with a human being," said Seth Demsey, CTO of AOL Platforms.
Verizon's Precision Market Insights division previously stumbled in its attempts to aggregate and package mobile data to help marketers target consumers and measure campaigns. Sprint's similar Pinsight Media division and AT&T's AdWorks—which segments and targets TV audiences—have not fared much better, according to observers.
But lackluster results from going it alone have driven telcos toward companies that can facilitate cashing in on data. Along with SAP on the marketer-facing side, others including HP and IBM have stepped in to help phone carriers on the back-end data management and analysis side.
When Spanish operator Telefonica embarked on its Dynamic Insights offering, it partnered with consumer insights firm GfK to help package the telco's mobile data for clients including U.K. food purveyor Morrisons. The grocery chain used the service to garner anonymized data connecting consumer demographic data to location visits.
Some of these data relationships have long histories. SAP America owns Sybase, a subsidiary it bought in 2010 that serves as a technology hub for multiple mobile carriers and counts Verizon as a partner. The Sybase business has provided "deep relationships with mobile operators around the globe," said Rohit Tripathi, global VP and general manager of SAP Mobile Services, in an email.
AirSage, another firm that has tight integrations with mobile operators, supplies data to municipal planners, retail store developers and city tourism boards. The company integrated its technology with telecom companies in the 1990s to enable 911 call support services. More recently it has signed data deals with Verizon Wireless and Sprint. "Our solution is actually plugged into the network behind the firewall of the carrier," said Ryan Kinskey, director of business development and sales at AirSage. Device IDs tracked by AirSage are anonymized, he added.
Verizon and Sprint declined to comment for this story. AT&T and T-Mobile said they don't share consumer or location data with SAP, Sybase, AirSage or Vistar.
*Why the secrecy?* Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don't want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background.
"The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they're revealing their customers' data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in. Verizon's privacy policy, for example, says that information collected on its customers may "be aggregated or anonymized for business and marketing uses by us or by third parties."
Ultimately, for mobile operators, these relationships could reap substantial income from the data generated by subscribers who already account for their primary revenue streams. The telcos do not break out revenue derived from their data-related sales in their quarterly earnings reports, so just how much money they're making from these deals is not known.
SAP will "effectively share the revenue back with the operator, so they get to make money from data that they're basically not utilizing or under-utilizing today," former SAP Mobile President John Sims said at an industry conference in Las Vegas in 2013 as the company introduced Consumer Insight 365.
"The mobile operators don't want to reveal this," said Mr. Tripathi, the SAP Mobile Services executive. No matter how much telcos and their partners stress that the data is anonymized and aggregated, he said, "they are fearful people will take this and twist it into something that it isn't."
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-dat a-business-telcos-discuss/301058/
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