The loyalty card system existed long before the generalisation of computer science. Its digital adapt has been done naturally, using the same principles: list the regular consumers therewith retain them by offering various advantages
Computers, allowing endless listings, a fine purchase tracking and the contact with each customer, turned out to be the ideal tool to the client follow-up. Moreover, this allows the customisation of offers and the targeting of promotional products. Thus, a famous web site like Adidas can send promotions about the equipment of the user's favourite team.
This personalized targeting is well seen in the list of requested information during the registration process. It is not unusual to have questions about hobbies of the family, but also the family composition.
By contrast, even without loyalty card, the online shopper is, by definition, identified (name, address) and the whole purchasing history is stored. This huge database is used for the contacts and promotions, like loyalty cards, but also to measure the success of a product. This allows to anticipate orders, filter best-seller suppliers.
At a very large scale, mathematical statistics can be applied as, in the case of Amazon , which pre-forwards products on different geographic sites even before the purchase, to reduce delivery time.
In the previous cases, the buyer provides himself this information, with or without loyalty card. Many websites don't offer purchase, but still wish to know the habits of their anonymous users. Cookies collected and set in the user's browser allow to identify any user coming back to collect geographic information (country, language, city). Individuals aren't admittedly known by name, but they are strictly identified and managed. These usage statistics will allow the websites to justify their level of attendance, for advertisers or potential company buyer.
Since 2009, a European directive had imposed a warning about the use of cookies by websites because these operations are invisible for the users who are therefore tracked even without knowing it. Nearly all major web sites are using cookies: these notices are unfortunately perceived as disturbing internet browsing and thus are ignored by users who validate the notices systematically.
Behind the nice free services offered (like mails, instant messaging, information wall, thoughts, …), social networks such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others are collecting a huge amount of personal data. All these data, private or not, are analysed, merged in order to identify the consumers profiles. These statistics are reused in the marketing targeting of these social networks or sold to companies targeting a better advertising efficiency or even direct contact with these potential clients
This is frequently referred as Big Data
How are used our personal data ?
The data collected are used to establish profiles.
A profile is a file containing all the person's data. The sharper the information is, the more valuable it is. Profiles are hardly sold alone, the minimum size of profiles set is usually above 1000.
Let's see the Criteo sample. This company is a famous actor of the Data Marketing, which aims at producing targeted adverting based on the personal data.
It has got data on about 850 millions of internet surfers per month. The sets of 1000 profiles are then sold between 60 cents and 250 euros
Its profits' range is going from 0.5 to 200 millions of euros per month.
The Big Data market generated a turnover of 8.9 billions dollars in 2013
