This week, the RIP law raised its ugly head again which has, in turn, prompted privacy activists to start waving their banners and placards (the government has been citing anti-terrorism laws to justify an extension of its power to ‘snoop’ on citizens.) Ever since the internet became a mass-media channel, the UK government has been constantly looking for ways to force providers to give it access to information about its citizens (and often winning). On the one side, the government believes that the ability to access such information will help make Britain a safer place (initially in the identification and prevention of crimes) and on the other side, privacy campaigners argue that this is a breach of our human rights, that the government doesn’t need this information and that they certainly can’t be trusted to keep this information secure (no argument on THAT front).

Whatever your viewpoint about our government’s febrile attempts to move to a more US-related model on data interception and analysis, the storage, manipulation and mining of data is one of the core facets of interactive technology that separate good services from great services. Many of the sites that have been mentioned in our weekly diatribes are distinguishable through their intelligent use of the information that users have given them: Amazon, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are a few good examples. What is especially compelling is that the majority of the more recent applications are intelligent, i.e. the more information you give, the better the service that you get back. The applications, effectively, have the capability to learn and adapt…

As people (and especially Geny Y) are increasingly cavalier about how freely accessible they make information about themselves available online, this represents a great opportunity if you know how to use it:

• from a recruiter’s point of view, it means that we have access, from our desktop, to a vast array of freely available information about candidates (I’ve sent out presentations about this previously);
• from a recruitment advertising point of view, if we can tap into this information, we can start shifting to the utopian model of one on one advertising. At the very least, we can start considering a longer, more intelligent approach to building and communicating to a talent pool.

Anyway, this week we came across a site that takes the whole area of supplying information about yourself to a new level: Fire Eagle (http://fireagle.yahoo.net) is a piece of code that you can use to display your exact whereabouts on your blog, or website (I can imagine that a Facebook extension will be available very soon). It essentially uses your mobile number to triangulate your position and displays it on a map. In theory, you can choose who you want this information to be displayed to. The technology isn’t that new, we have mentioned a different use of this previously (4 July, Friday Thoughts: Transparency Tyranny – www.citysense.com) and in a recent Dragon’s Den, a similar offering was absolutely slated.

However, the application is pretty cool (and very disturbing in a Big Brother sense) but It got me thinking. If we are able to buy accurate mobile lists (and this in itself is plagued with difficulties due to the preponderance of pay-as-you-go in the UK), we should be able to flip the application someway and send out recruitment messages to individuals who were in a specific location. And we all know that geo-targeting is something that our clients are very interested in…

Great idea, but the question still remains – are users really ready for such intrusive advertising?