Joho the Blog: Hands off my birthday, Robots!

November 08, 2007

Hands off my birthday, Robots!

On the day of my birthday recently (happy birthday, yadda yadda and thank you very much) I received birthday greetings from several sites that had required my date of birth for me to register. No, not those sort of sites. The warm birthday wishes came from a diabetes forum. a social networking site, a game site, and a dental practice.

Somehow, I don't feel any better about these companies because they wished me a happy birthday. Getting personal greetings from a SQL program doesn't really ring my personal chimes. In fact, I like those companies just a little bit less because they think so little of me.

But then I'm just perverse. [Tags: marketing ]

Posted by D. Weinberger at November 8, 2007 12:45 PM

Comments

This is a debate we are facing in education at this time: personalization (which students like) versus intrusion (which they don't). It's hard to get it right 100% of the time.

Posted by: AJ Cann | November 8, 2007 01:15 PM

Yes, it's hard to get right. But it's helpful to distinguish the personalization that tailors something to your needs and the personalization that has robots pretending to know you personally. These birthday greetings fall into the latter category.

Posted by: David Weinberger | November 8, 2007 03:10 PM

I recently had a birthday and got a physical birthday greeting from Southwest Airlines, which presumably has my birthday on file from being in the Rapid Rewards program. My wife and I had two distinct reactions to the card.

She thought it was insanely creepy and invasive, and didn't want Southwest to even acknowledge that they were accessing that personal data even for something trivial like this.

I thought it was a waste of money.

Not exactly a winning decision by Southwest, at least for our family.

Posted by: greebs | November 8, 2007 04:22 PM

Actually it's a month I keep receiving "happy birthdays" from my friends on Facebook (My BD is in february, and now it's november, so that's even worse).

SQL informs wrongly my friends. If it did it right, well I could appreciate that, a nice reminder. But I'm with you. I don't like bot's wishes (they don't bring presents (:-)) and bot-alerted-friends'-wishes aren't the most sincere, altough sometimes it's a healthy aid to memory.

Posted by: Marco Massarotto | November 8, 2007 09:02 PM

you think it is bad now, wait until the 2.0 thing really sets up house in your life.... happy birthday from coca cola.... one quality these people seem short on is intuition, human insight into how much people dislike interruption designed to only serve the interrupter.... i refuse to buy clothes from JosABank because of all the email messages after i once did so....

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