Understanding Mocality : An amatuer assessment
Me thots, corrections highly welcome. :-) I saw the recent clip on tech crunch and though I've not paid any attention to Mocality, the clip had some interesting questions. I had some freetime last evening and allocated this to research and understanding of Mocality. Upfront Mocality has been defined as " A Mobile Business Directory for Africa". This to me was excellent news but I was a bit more interested in specifics. According to various kenyan bloggers, Mocality is a mobile-based and crowd-sourced business directory that operates out of Cape Town in South Africa but has been deliberately launched in Kenya first". I then got onto the Mocality website and its pretty nice and simple to use. However, under terms and conditions in sections 10 and 27 has raised many questions for me. These 2 terms and conditions changed my view about Mocality i.e " A Mobile Business Directory for Africa". To me, Mocality front-end is a business directory for those who may not understand marketing and data mining but seems the main concept of Mocality is a data mining service. Mainly such information is valuable to marketeers, advertisers, business intelligence, statistics etc. So my assessment puts Mocality as a data mining service to those who are at the back-end of the system. I could be totally wrong here so as am not an expert on such issues. Rgds.
a classic case of what you sell is not necessarily what you advertise.. On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 9:19 AM, aki <aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
Me thots, corrections highly welcome. :-)
I saw the recent clip on tech crunch and though I've not paid any attention to Mocality, the clip had some interesting questions.
I had some freetime last evening and allocated this to research and understanding of Mocality. Upfront Mocality has been defined as " A Mobile Business Directory for Africa". This to me was excellent news but I was a bit more interested in specifics. According to various kenyan bloggers, Mocality is a mobile-based and crowd-sourced business directory that operates out of Cape Town in South Africa but has been deliberately launched in Kenya first".
I then got onto the Mocality website and its pretty nice and simple to use. However, under terms and conditions in sections 10 and 27 has raised many questions for me.
These 2 terms and conditions changed my view about Mocality i.e " A Mobile Business Directory for Africa". To me, Mocality front-end is a business directory for those who may not understand marketing and data mining but seems the main concept of Mocality is a data mining service. Mainly such information is valuable to marketeers, advertisers, business intelligence, statistics etc.
So my assessment puts Mocality as a data mining service to those who are at the back-end of the system.
I could be totally wrong here so as am not an expert on such issues.
Rgds. _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Server donations spreadsheet http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AopdHkqSqKL-dHlQVTMxU1VBdU1BSWJxdy1f... ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
So continuing from the earlier thread and a disclaimer, ( please note that all this research is highly speculative and do disregard as rubbish, as the info is quite limited to go by) . My assessment puts Mocality as a data mining service to those who are at the back-end of the system. Then the questions started flowing. 1) Is the CCK aware of the data mining service? 2) Where is the data being held? 3) Is Mocality a licensed operation under the CCK guidelines as a mobile services provider ? 4) Who has access to the data? And my questions really started going downhill : 1) Why would Naspers and MIH develop such a system in KE? Agreed we are a large mobile market but what's the local data got to do with South African Companies? 2) The J2ME software obviously installed on the handset must have some cookie that picks up info. Has the software been looked at and approved locally? As I said earlier, am not an expert on these issues but a whole confused about the product. I hope clarifications are possible for the general good of the public who use the services. I think Mocality are doing an excellent job with their project, just hope that am very wrong on the points raised so far by an amatuer like me. Rgds
I dont know the ethical ramifications of this esp the part where they can provide your information to third parties and that they cannot guarantee your privacy (among other things). I think very few (if any) of the people that use the service have read the terms. Question is, does the fact that they have clearly stated all this in their terms and conditions exonerate them from any potential use of your information outside the originally intended use (either from them or 3rd parties)? As such if your info was to be used by a third party for example to spam your phone with ads they could simply say. "We told you that could happen. Its all in the terms and conditions". -Billy
Its unfortunate that our regulators sometime fail to invest in the know how e.g. Using spreadsheets for police occurrence book. Is cck or kebs having capacity to check the concerns out. A Digression: kenya uses slow building materials, when other new and fast techs are available, because of regulations in place On 9/1/10, Billy <billyx5@gmail.com> wrote:
I dont know the ethical ramifications of this esp the part where they can provide your information to third parties and that they cannot guarantee your privacy (among other things). I think very few (if any) of the people that use the service have read the terms.
Question is, does the fact that they have clearly stated all this in their terms and conditions exonerate them from any potential use of your information outside the originally intended use (either from them or 3rd parties)? As such if your info was to be used by a third party for example to spam your phone with ads they could simply say. "We told you that could happen. Its all in the terms and conditions".
-Billy
-- Sent from my mobile device
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aki -
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the mayor