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Telcos know more about you than Google, and how they're using it to deliver personalised experiences

Telcos know more about you than Google, and how they're using it to deliver personalised experiences

By Gopal Sathe | Updated: 28 March 2014 10:54 IST

You get a notification from your phone that new app updates are available. As you start the update process, you get a message from the phone company, telling you that the network usage is very high at this time and if you're willing to delay the download to a time when traffic is low, the company will offer you heavily-discounted data. The updates are far from critical, so you accept the offer, happy with the money you've just saved.

Later, when you're near a movie hall, you get another update from your provider. The cinema nearby has some new releases - would you like to see a trailer? Maybe not - there are a lot of films that release each week and you won't be interested in most of them. But what if the company is aware of the films you've been watching in the past, and sends you a trailer for a movie that you're really excited about? And if that trailer doesn't have to be served from half a continent away, but can be saved at the local base station so that it's shown without any buffering at all, wouldn't that be even better?

IBM on Wednesday announced several new technologies that they believe will make scenarios like these real sooner than you can imagine. As Ramesh Gopinath, the Director of IBM Research India and Chief Technologist IBM India and South Asia says, "Telecom operators are sitting in the middle of so much data and they're not doing anything with it. If you have all this information then you can also serve your customers much better."

Another concept called 'Vibes' lets teclos analyse audience interaction on social networks, cross referenced with their puchase history and their interests based on other social activity, such as the connections between different callers. Taking the jargon out of things, this means a method to match the behaviour of a user with their social media presence to figure out, for instance, the perfect movie trailer to suggest to you when you pass a cinema.

This is something that's already happening via apps but as Gopinath points out, telcos have a lot more data about your behaviour than an app does. Vikas Sehgal, Director, Telecom Industry, IBM India and South Asia points out that companies have moved from just measuring who's making calls and how many, to knowing which websites you visit and how much time you spend on them; knowing the path of your daily commute; how much video content you watch and what you're watching, and much more, on a daily basis. This information can be used by telecoms to suggest everything from a data plan to a discount coupon from a retail partner which it knows you're going to be interested in.

The appeal of such an idea is obvious. Sehgal outlines a world where companies can bridge online and offline experiences, and give you the information you want, when you want it, without your having to do anything.

For example, the company has a project called people in motion, which it says the telcos could use to sell analytics information through APIs. The companies are already aware of your location information, and they can connect this to your social activity to predict what you will be doing next. "We could give people information they needed before they thought to ask for it. There are some apps that already do this," he says - such as Google Now, for instance. "You're sitting in the middle of the data. Others will do it as well, but why won't you?"

They can also sell this data to retail partners, to help them analyse movement patterns, coupled with interests, and figure out the best place to open a restaurant or a bookstore. Gopinath says that this information is also extremely useful for law enforcement.

For all this to really add value though, the importance is in analytics. That's where IBM's Watson comes in. Gopinath showed us something the company calls Watson Engagement Advisor. Developed in IBM's India Research Labs, the Engagement Advisor uses resources from the Watson group within IBM. In the demo that Gopinath showed, a customer chats with Watson and asks it a series of unrelated questions of the ratings of his new phone, to the 4G coverage in his college, to the various tariff plans available. In seconds, the computer is able to generate the correct answers, scanning through thousands of documents, while also parsing questions which are phrased in everyday conversational English.

It's incredibly impressive, and also a little worrying, because this means that the huge amount of data we're generating can also be studied with the same ease and pin-point accuracy.

Do we understand what we opt in to?
Gopinath is candid when asked about privacy concerns. The system is anonymised and the information is aggregated but he says, "[It] can be compromised if the telco wants to", although he doesn't think it is something that is going to happen. Added to that is the fact that IBM is only proposing organising and analysing the data which "telcos already have." The point, which goes unaddressed, is that customers aren't always aware of what they're signing up for.

Think about the number of apps that you've installed, and ask yourself why a simple game needs to be able to read your contact list, or why a to-do list wants to be able to read all your Facebook information? We've gotten into the habit of blindly giving away consent as long as we're getting something free, if it promises even the slightest amount of convenience.

But what's different is that Facebook has never sent a debt collector to the wrong person's office, threatened people over small delays (a certain telecom operator in India comes to mind), and worse. And in the light of the NSA-spying revelations, are you comfortable with companies getting even better at studying your information? Even if your telco isn't misusing this information, is it keeping it securely, so that you're not at the mercy of third parties?

The fact is though, that with a service like Watson being able to surface small amounts of data amongst a vast store of information, it can be used not just on the customer side but also as a way of finally wringing out the last drop of value in our identities. The telecoms have always had access to too much information about us, but in the past, we've been drowning them in data - new developments will make it easier than ever for companies to analyse our information for profit.

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