My Telco is doing WHAT with my data ?

Telecom companies have some of the richest, deepest data sets of all industries. Because the business model involves contracting customers to monthly plans or providing pre-pay SIMs which people rarely change, the Telcos understand their customer better than almost all other industries.

You might buy a car once every two or three years, or take a holiday a couple of times per year. That gives the automotive and travel industries a little data about what you like, and what you might buy next time. But Telcos have access to a constant stream of data from your smartphone, set-top TV box and internet connection. 

The only industry that gets close to the level of data that Telcos have is Retail. The supermarket loyalty card has revolutionised the retail experience. Anyone who has had a book of vouchers through the post from Tesco, and been delighted that there are special offers on exactly the products they buy frequently, has been touched by this new data-driven approach.

Telcos are in a race to offer 'quad-play'. That is home phone, mobile, broadband and TV... bundled together from one supplier. In UK you can choose from BT, TalkTalk, Virgin or Vodafone. And it's not just the extra revenue they will get from you from each service that interest them, it's your data that is the gold mine they are prospecting for.

So what data do Telcos have on you? Well, the answer is a little disturbing. If you take all four services from, say, BT. Then BT can extract and store your data from each of their systems. Those systems contain records of your calls, your TV viewing habits, your location and your internet activity levels. With a little extra effort, they can extract details of: everything you've watched, live and on-demand; whether you watched the ads or skipped them; what you google and which websites you visit; where you travel frequently and which route you take.

If that wasn't creepy enough, they can pull data together from each of these systems and identify a profile based on other people's behaviour to understand even more about you. The observations that they can make are sometimes based on probability, but the accuracy of the profiling is enough for the Telco to make better decisions on how to keep you as a customer and sell you more services.

Here's a very short list of some of the things they know about you, or could derive from multiple data sets.

Sounds a little scary... right? Well, it's not as bad as it seems. For one thing, the Telco companies are not terribly interested in you. As long as you pay them your monthly fee or top-up regularly, that's their main concern. They might try to sell you some related products like more TV channels, cloud storage or phone insurance. They'll use the data for that. But most of the value in your data is in selling it to other companies.

Just in the TV data which Telcos have access to, there is a revolution underway. TV viewing ratings used to be collected by panels of viewers with special equipment. In UK the BARB panel was around 5,000 households. All the TV ratings were extrapolated from this small group of panelists. Now, every TV box can record every program watched, every button press, every play/pause/record action. All this data is sent back to the Telco in real-time. This gives highly accurate real-time data to share with advertisers, to share with production companies, and to add to all the telephone, mobile and internet data the Telco holds.

The system works so well that leading TV providers are able to insert targeted adverts into your live program feed, which specifically target you as an individual. They know it's you watching, and not your wife or your kids, because the way that you use the remote control buttons is as unique as your fingerprint.

Telcos have a system called DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), which allows them to look inside the IP packets which make up all internet traffic. DPI data shows exactly which web pages you've visited along with time-stamps, details of cookies, usernames (not passwords), and purchases. 

So combining this with your viewing behaviour, the Telco can tell a TV advertiser exactly whether their TV advert directly resulted in a visit to their site and a purchase. It's the most information an advertiser has ever had about the effectiveness of their advertising channels. And for that, they pay handsomely. Even basic personal data is worth a few pence per customer in the multi-billion pound data brokerage business. If that customer is in a high earning job, or high spending period of life, that value rockets to around £1. Multiplied by the millions of customers that Telcos have, this represents a tidy earner for the Telcos. And that is yesterday's model. Today's real-time model changes the game. 

In India, an insurance company is working with a Telco to give away free life insurance. In a market where only 3% of the population has life cover, there is a huge opportunity. The life insurance company has seen that it can get detailed lifestyle data from the Telco that it previously couldn't find. In poor communities, families don't have regular income, bank accounts, credit cards or even loyalty cards. But they all have a mobile phone. The mobile phone is the only way to get information about this sector of the population. 

Of course, the insurance company is betting on a proportion of those taking the free basic life cover to upgrade to a paid life cover. With the mobile phone derived customer data, the insurance company can make accurate cost/benefit analysis on each application for paid cover. Previously the risk was too great and the cost of cover too high. Now, the risk is calculable and the cost can be tailored to the individual.

Telcos are, in general, sensitive to the power they have with all this data. There is often strong governance about what data can be used within the Telco and what can be shared outside the Telco. As the intelligent systems being deployed by Telcos start to use these data sets, your experience with the Telco should improve. They won't post you as much junk mail, or spam you with as many irrelevant offers. They will be able to fix network or device problems before you're even aware of the problem, and they should be able to tailor your service to your needs at a competitive price.

But if that doesn't settle your nerves, there is European legislation coming in 2018, which will allow you to ask any company to delete all the data that it holds about you. Simply and quickly, you will be able to revoke their access to your data. When UK leaves the EU, it's anticipated that we will have similar legislation too.

And if you are very worried about what your data says about you, then I'd advise you to clean up your act. The data reflects your reality. If your reality is such that your data is, at best - embarrassing, and at worse - incriminating, then you only have yourself, and your data, to blame.

The search for Smarts part 2

Since my original post 'The search for Smarts', my Garmin Fenix2 came back to life. 

The achilles heel of Garmin's chosen charging technology is the contacts on the rear of the watch. With occasional muddy/sweaty use virtually guaranteed, the contacts can misbehave. Without being visibly 'dirty', the contacts can pick up some kind of oxidation, which doesn't allow the watch to charge through the charging clip. That results in a dead watch which you think is fully charged.

To fix the problem simply requires a wipe of the contacts with an abrasive fabric, wet-dry paper or the serrated edge of a coin, and the watch will happily recharge.

So, that's what happened and my Fenix2 is back to normal and my search for a new smart watch is on hold again.

In the intervening period a report was released about the state of the smart watch market in 2016. Despite the impressive marketing budgets behind many smart watch offerings, the market has declined by 51% year-on-year for the quarter. The figures were heavily driven by Apple and Garmin.

Q3 2015 was the first full quarter that the Apple Watch Series 1 was commercially available, and it took almost 70% market share in that quarter. The Apple Watch Series 2 was only available in 2 weeks of this quarter, so it's too early to say whether the 72% decline in Apple Watch sales will be offset. 

Garmin is the run-away winner in the segment, shipping 5x more watches in the quarter than in that quarter in 2015. The sport-specific smart watch market which Garmin dominates is a play-ground of micro-niches which Garmin understands and has tailored their bewildering array of watches towards. Whatever kind of athlete you are in your free time, Garmin has a watch for you. The Apple Watch, however, is a one-size fits all offering. (ok, two-sizes, but you get my point). Your Apple Watch doesn't mark you out as a triathlete, an ultra-runner, a gym-goer or a mountain climber. The Garmin on your wrist leaves no-one in any doubt which sporting preference you have.

And here's the key point in the decline of the smart watch market. Your watch is a functional accessory. It isn't your means of communication, your window on social media, your media player or your entertainment whilst commuting. It sits on your wrist as an overt display of your life-style preferences. There is a reason why people chose to wear a Rolex or a Casio, and that reason is 'difference'. The non-smart watch market is well established, with a huge range of options at both ends of the price scale. Are you a Gold Rolex or a Patek Philippe kind of guy? Are you a Casio CA53W or a Casio F91W guy? Up until mid 2015, nobody was an Apple Watch guy. And now, most people who wanted to be an Apple Watch guy already are. Everyone else is not-an-Apple-Watch-guy.

I would love to see Apple and their smartphone competitors continue to develop the rather impressive technology in smart watches over the coming years. They need to do more to tempt people away from the simplicity of a Casio, or the prestige of a luxury watch. 

I'm an CA53W guy, in case you were wondering. 

For or against the pay-wall

The Telegraph's online news site was my go-to as a counterpoint to the near ubiquity of the BBC here in UK. I was perfectly happy with The Telegraph, and would put up with attention grabbing adverts, advertorials, promotional features, because the news I wanted to read was free.

Today, The Telegraph online news service introduced a 'Premium' service, asking £2 per week for access to this 'Premium content'. At first glance, it seems that anyone with an opinion, or with a sense of humour, or even simple story telling chops has been put behind this pay-wall.

Flat news is important, and can be glanced over to keep abreast of happenings. For those subjects about which I feel a deeper level of interest, I want to know what other people think, I want to be entertained, and I want to have my views challenged. All of this, on The Telegraph, is now behind the pay-wall.

I should mention that the adverts, advertorials and promotional features are still there. 

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox, an inferior browser with a quirky attitude to hyperlinks, purely in an attempt to remove the epidemic of almost full-screen automatically placed ads. I was fed up of scrolling multiple times to get to the meat of the articles in pages full of inappropriate, repetitive, invasive ads.

The Telegraph's paid-for apps for phone and tablet also never appealed to me. Perhaps because most of the content was available for free through the online web service. They are marginally more appealing now, but only because the online experience is now unpleasant.

Sure, I could spend £2 a week to 'unlock' Premium content, or I could go the whole-hog and drop £6 a week on Premium with Digital - and have the same content nicely arranged, with no ads in a swish app. But here's the problem...

I don't want to pay now for something I used to get for free. I'm looking at a Telegraph news page where nearly half of the articles (and 90% of the ones worth reading) are locked. As a non-suscriber, I don't want to be shown everything that I can't have, as a constant reminder that my purse-strings are pulled too tightly. I want to have what Telegraph provided for me for years, for free. If they're not going to do that, I'll go elsewhere. I'm sorry, Graham Norton and Simon Heffer aren't enough to keep me loyal. 

What I'll do instead is go to the trouble of configuring Google News with my interests, dig deeper into BBC News, and cherry pick from Huffpost, The Guardian, and more specialist press - all of which are free-to-me.

So sorry Mr Chris Evans (Editor not DJ)... you've lost me, possibly forever. If too many others fail to immediately re-value their Telegraph news feed - by £104 per year, the Telegraph will have created a bigger problem than falling newsprint customers. They'll rapidly fade into online obscurity.