Profiling customers by looking at their browser history
 Would you like to know which sites your visitors use? That's the service being offered by, amongst others, beencounter. By adding a bit of javascript to your website you can start to track where your visitors have been and which sites they have - and have not - visited. The potential to build customer profiles, these sites claim, is awesome.
Maybe, but let's just think about this for a moment. By using this service you are going to spy on where your visitors have and have not been.
Let's break this down a bit....
Technically these services appear to work by accessing the browser's history and looping through it. This is subject to a couple of technical limitations: javascript being active in the browser and the user not clearing out their history. It is also tied to a single machine so if, like me, you use different machines regularly the profile is less one of a specific user and more of a particular computer.
The data this hack produces appears to be unreliable. I have been running tests using three different browsers (Safari, Chrome and Firefox) with false positives and negatives being produced. That is to say the script reports I have visited sites I have not, or not visited sites I have. Together with the dependence on users not clearing out histories I doubt the data being produced is of any significant value. No doubt, however, this will be ignored and we'll soon have people proclaiming the "truth" about the sort of people who visit their sites!
More important, to my mind, is the ethical aspect of this approach and whether it is appropriate for it to be used. Our browser history is something that is personal to us and one which most of us think is private. By sneaking a peak at it we're acting in a way that is tantamount to accessing someone's mobile phone without them knowing and looking at who they've been calling or texting. So on the one hand we're acting in a way that could be considered to be dishonest, on the other we're asking customers to trust us with their credit card numbers, orders, personal data and so on.
To my mind this is one of those occasions when I step back from what is technically possible and ask whether what we're doing is actually responsible. For me this profiling is a step too far away from my own beliefs in conducting business in a transparent and honest manner.
Previously on this blog...
the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
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A dozen beautiful images of Saturn
Wired presents a dozen of the best images from the Cassini mission
Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Building a website for multiple languages is not just about translation. It is a critical business decision that has to be taken carefully.
Why call centre staff deserve your respect
If call centre staff set the first impression for your business, why do we treat them so badly?
Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
Specialising requires hard strategic decisions to be made about your business.
When good people move on
Losing a member of staff to another company is not necessarily a bad thing
The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
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