Like me, you’re probably bored with receiving more and more ‘please opt-in’ GDPR emails. Like most you probably agree it’s a good thing – unless you’re a marketeer in which case you suspect it’s all a bit Y2K – for those of us old enough to remember the world was meant to come to an end at 00.01 on 1/1/2000 as most digital instruments were apparently calibrated to only the last two digits and so would think it was 1900, not 2000. The only winners then were ‘consultants’ and suspect there’s been a little ‘scaring’ going on this time too.
I read recently with interest Matt Lowndes’s decision to delete his Facebook account and can’t help feeling that, although the GDPR thing is a bit heavy-handed, the pendulum has swung far too far in the easy data, let’s all do everything online direction.
I was with the head of one of the biggest UK estate agents earlier today and he used a fun analogy. Butchers have seen business dwindle as people bought/ordered ready cuts meat. But suddenly upmarket butchers have queues around the block again. It’s all about perceived value and service.
The reason I mention the above is that whatever you think about the overshoot in data usage there’ll always be a proper middle ground. I don’t think we’ll ever get all our mortgages online, in the same way, we won’t all using driverless cars [bloody hope not anyway] and that people will always be prepared to pay for something that is a cut above.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if so many Matt’s deleted their Facebook accounts that they had to come back cap in hand to apologise for allegedly being used to cause much of the political upheaval we currently see around us? Now that’s a return to old values I could really get behind.
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