Comment by danielrhodes
4 years ago
Data collection is what companies do when they have no empathy. It's like an ivory tower effect where you don't interact with customers day to day or don't know what they want, so you try to use data to fill in the (large) gap. I could come up with countless examples of amazing products where nobody was using data to justify their decisions.
That's because the user of the service or device is not the customer.
If you're saying they are the product, that's a very old trope and easily falsified. For example, advertisers come to Facebook because, and only because, users are there. If users stopped liking Facebook, they wouldn't be there anymore. If they aren't there anymore, advertisers don't want to be there either. Thus, Facebook is incentivized to keep users happy - they are the most important people to Facebook. From what I've heard, Facebook struggles to get engineers to work on ads. If advertisers were the true customers, I imagine most engineers would be more gung-ho to work on ads because that would align more closely with career success at the company.
The above doesn't justify unrestrained tracking of user activity - but let's not pretend companies get to where they are because they create a first-class space for advertisers. They get to where they are because they, at least at one point, created a great product for their customers.