What each of us can do to prevent our personal data theft

 With smart phones, laptops, social media and the armies of attention engineers employed by the tech firms, we have willingly become digital slaves sacrificing our privacy and personal data to avail services and convenience online. Some of us have unfortunately seen our identities misused/abused, our financial data compromised and much worse. What can each of us do personally to reduce the above risks ? ( This is a living list that gets updated as more ideas are collated. )

1. Use Google Takeout to export all your personal data from google accounts ( photos, drive, gmail etc) to your personal local computer/drives.
2. Once the above step is done, disable all ‘’auto upload settings’ of your data to Google /iCloud etc from your mobile phone/laptop/PC and other devices . Ensure this is done for all devices used by your family members. And then delete all this data on Google/icloud etc.
3. Create a mail account ( without any personal identifiers e.g. xyz12344@gmail.com ) and use this for all newsletter subscriptions/online services etc which could be potentially used by spammers/promotions etc.
4. Check and ensure that none of your online accounts contain personal financial information, passwords, personal identifiers etc.
5. Search for large mails ( mails with large attachments ) in your gmail account. Most of these big attachments contain data that would be personal and sensitive. Remove all such mails with big attachments from your mail accounts to reduce risk.
6. A simple cost effective way to manage your personal data is to have two pocket drives which act as back up to each other. You can get a 4Tb pocket drive on Amazon for Rs8k and use simple tools such as Free file sync to setup an automatic backup between these drives to update files between the drives at a frequency.
7. If you want the convenience of being able to share documents like Google Drive links, consider a costlier private cloud option with devices called Network Attached Storage devices ( NAS). One example is Synology.Such devices are connected to your home wifi network and will have storage drives ( which are expandable/stackable). Data that you back up on these drives can be accessed remotely from any device thru link sharing/apps etc. DO NOT DO A CLOUD BACK UP of your personal data on vendor’s cloud, no matter how secure they claim it to be. With such a setup, you can access your data anywhere on any device and share data with people you trust, WITHOUT STORING YOUR DATA ON ANY VENDOR’s CLOUD.
8. Do not submit any personal information on any online or offline forms/ raffle forms. These are magnets for data theft.
9. It is worthwhile to have two mobile SIMs , with one SIM exclusively for personal contacts. Also be ruthless in not installing/removing apps that can be potential data hacks . With finger print scanners and our indiscriminate allowing of apps to our mobile data, it does not take much for them to impersonate you on your personal finance/banking apps by reading your finger print data and the OTP.
10. By the same logic, avoid any financial app that does not authenticate you in atleast two ways before allowing data access/transactions.
11. No sharing of personal data/OTP/financial information on phone to anyone.

Third Side of the Coin

 In the recent Gamestop episode, there was a group of wallstreet firms who shorted the stock on one side, and the redditors who bet against that bet on the other. There was a third side. Being in that side is a skill worth cultivating.

The third side did not care about who was right or wrong. They just clinically looked at it as a momentum opportunity and made money on the stock price gains ( and probably on the way down as well!) As business and hype cycles get shorter over the next decade, many such opportunities present themselves. How do you see it ahead of the time or at the start, mobilize resources and take advantage of the opportunity before window closes? It is quite possible that the next opportunity might be diametrically opposite or unrelated to this one.

The ability to acquire or find skills for these short treasure hunts is a skill by itself. That can be broken down into (at least) the following:

1. Hustle: Ability to identify/acquire/mobilize resources
2. Accepting Risk: Awareness and comfort with the fact that quite a few of these may not work out ( as a smart man said : ‘ It is not an experiment if you already know the results in advance!’)
3. Against the Herd: Every social media/peer group/community wants you to ‘conform’. Going against is not easy or popular.
4. Learn and DO NOT repeat: The one thing in your control is to absorb learnings every time and ensuring you make only NEW mistakes, not OLD ones!
5. Be ( incredibly ) Fast! : Criticality of this cannot be overstated.

Now how many of the above qualities come naturally to us, taught to us? How to acquire these skills/behaviors ? Can they be ‘learnt’ at all? What current windows am I not seeing?

Risk- Life Saving Skill

 Driving and Swimming have always been considered the life saving skills. Risk taking needs to be added to this.

If there is one skill that’s never taught in schools and colleges, it is taking and managing risks. Risk is always described as something scary that needs to be avoided and worried about. Millennials are proving it wrong. Prior to 90s, Government ( and Public sector enterprises) was the biggest employer in India and the bureaucracy always taught one how to avoid taking any chances. Private enterprises became prominent in 2000s that slowly brought in meritocracy that focused on productivity and hard work.

The roaring twenties of 2020 have ushered in a world where nothing is certain. Best companies fall from grace and fail, Rock stars become persona-non-grata overnight and extremes have become more common , be it the inequalities in society , radical behaviors or social media generated movements. Firm which advocated that only ‘Paranoid survive’ is finding it tough to survive the brutal global tech enabled world. Pandemic is suddenly making the commercial real estate look shaky, dividend paying darlings of the pensioners are needing to borrow to keep the dividend, governments are not thinking twice in printing/underwriting debt that’s a quarter of their economy. Change that used to take decades is happening in months. Management gurus are finding it difficult to even speak, let alone spout a theory to explain the world.

Millennials with nothing to lose are punting it all out, be it the options on fractional shares, bold startups, radical approaches to finance and life. Taking calculated risks has become a necessity to survive. Work was the means of earning and identity. Today wealth building is the means to freedom. While 90s took a few decades to build a unicorn, it takes a few years today.

For many generations, this is the new normal . Playing safe has become the ‘unsafe’. Risk taking will very soon be Business as Usual and not knowing it can put your life in danger.

Buying a Crowd Sourced ‘Truth’

 As more buying decisions are determined by ratings/reviews/stars, marketing is now about buying the opinion of the crowd. But how?

In the early years of mobile, getting customers was easy and building product was difficult. Today its much easier to build products with global sourcing and cloud. Its much difficult to get customers who rely more on their peers than the marketers. A reference call was a long drawn tedious process earlier but is now visible to all through stars, ratings, verified reviews and likes. Can you really buy/manufacture it?

Its no longer uncommon for firms to offer products/services free for a 5 star rating on app store or on market platforms. Today products offer cash back if you put a review post purchase with a 5 star rating. More likes on youtube video means it appears early in search results, more views and the network effect.

Have you considered these in your marketing strategy for this context?

1. Who are the biggest online influencers for your market segment? What is your plan for them to help your marketing agenda?
2. How genuine are your user ratifications in digital world?
3. Is your product /digital marketing plan ensuring that EVERY happy customer is leaving a digital thumbs-up ? How to encourage that behavior?
4. Are you capturing every action of the stakeholder across the ecosystem? Can you make the right offer at the right time triggered by Data?
5. How much of your cross-sell is determined by Data and not just a gut?
6. How well is customer engagement tracked/nurtured/tech enabled/enhanced/measured ? How much of customer insight is built into the Product design?
7. Subject to customer privacy laws, how well do you know where your customer is online? Are you there as well?
8. Have you considered Product led growth strategy to optimize your marketing spend?
9. Are you nurturing your next generation of customers who are digital natives?
10. How much of your product design incorporates this agenda?

As print/television/magazines/print newspaper/physical events are fading, marketing is changing significantly.

It is more determined by the crowd than the seller. As any cop will tell you, managing a crowd is anything but simple.

Growth through Innovation

 When pharma companies look to create new molecules, tesla makes electric trucks, people create unconventional products and prototypes, the process is fraught with risk. Why bother?

Just in the last 10 years, new business categories got created ( Smart phones, Electric vehicles, App stores, Social Networks…) making trillion dollar companies in the process. None of these firms started these products with valuations in mind. All they had was passion and perseverance.

I remember when I bought my first iphone (3), I was ridiculed that the phone was useful only for playing games and not for any ‘serious’ work ( which was done ‘very well' by Blackberry). Social networks were time wasters, Video calls were a fad and app stores were ignored.

Looking back, its difficult to imagine the ridicule each of those product leaders went through , trying to justify them to the spreadsheet based analysts and decision makers!

Firms such as 3M had policies to get a certain % of their revenue from new products EVERY year. In one stroke, it addresses growth, de-risking and obsolescence. While 3M may be an exception, this thinking and behavior does not come naturally to many. Most would like to follow the herd, copy the competition, stick to the routine and wait for orders. Last decade has proved that ‘least risky’ approach to be the ‘most risky’.

Given the surplus capital in the world today, what are needed are those bright ideas that can potentially change ( even a small part of the ) world. With the benefit of learnings of the past decade, there is enough of a rule book to ensure the idea pursuit is done right.

The millennials are enterprising enough to try new ideas , fail, dust up and try harder or smarter. The multiple cases of maniacal customer obsession to build a great product resulting in growth are testament to Product led growth strategies. ( Zerodha, Amazon, Zoho,Zappos…). These have turned the traditional approach of market study/business plan on their head.

Next decade belongs to those brave enough to build great products ignoring the naysayers.

Learning as Moat

While the world wonders on the out sized valuations of retail digital business, when the broad economy is in trouble due to the pandemic, there is a little known factor that makes them more powerful to defend themselves from competition. What is this Moat?

Moat is a deep, wide ditch surrounding a castle, fort, or town, typically filled with water and intended as a defense against attack.

Traditional businesses have been valued on financial parameters such as revenue, profitability, free cash flow, leverage etc. While these measure the business, they are always derivatives of the business attributes. One such is learning.

Let us ‘learn’ this with an example. Take a digital native business such as Amazon. While its Prime customer base , shopping experience, logistics are all well documented, what perhaps is not so well documented is its ‘learning as a MOAT’.

With millions of transactions and user behavior logged and analysed, it has learnt over years and decade on user behavior, both good and bad.

Lets take the bad first. A fake listing, a merchant fraud, a customer fraud are all behaviors that cause real financial loss on a daily basis and cause havoc on a business that works on thin margins. Amazon’s years of learnings on how to ‘detect’a bad user behavior and ‘prevent’bad user behaviors helps avoid those nasty costs. While a competitor can under-price themselves funded by VC money, what they cannot replicate are these learnings. Inability to control bad customer behavior is enough to put them out of business. Just ask credit card firms that are poor at handling customer fraud.

The recommendation engines to cross-sell have been fine tuned over years by variations such as seasons/regions/customer segments and many others that a competitor just cannot copy by poaching a few employees. No wonder China is blocking algorithm/model sale on Tiktok to the US owners.

The MOAT is in the data/learnings/algorithms that got finetuned over years and years. None of this is repeatable and there may be very few other businesses that have similar moats. While AWS may have funded these for Amazon and Ads may have funded these for Google, these are very very hard for others to replicate. Same logic goes for the chinese digital giants. Millions of customers have enriched these firms with their behavior and learnings thereof.

While the world is critiquing whether driver-less cars are a fad or fiction, the algorithmic learning is deciding winners and losers in multiple traditional businesses! 

Predictability to Acumen

The past decades have focused on automating to bring predictable outcomes. To compete effectively today, that is not enough.

Automation of ‘Smartening’

The intent+ability to learn from every action/data point, the lowering costs of storage/computing, open source code libraries, variability of costs due to cloud, global skill pool are resulting in businesses attempting to get smarter with every action/data point and related learning. Platforms enable the collective behavior of customers,suppliers,stakeholders be captured, analysed and abstracted.

Variability of costs allow for quick and cheap pivoting, creating and experimenting new business models on the fly with low failure costs. In this backdrop, mere automation and its associated predictability are not enough to compete.

‘Smartening’ also needs to be automated along with the process. It cannot be an after-thought.

Experimentation vs Agile

Experimenting is no longer confined to the R&D labs or small corners of the organisation. When businesses such as Booking.com run about 25,000 experiments a year to continuously fine tune/improve, A/B testing has become more powerful than just agile processes. A competitor with agile processes may not be able to compete with Booking.com’s personalisation/1000s of enhancements that add up to a significant competitive advantage.

Sacrilege

Process owners guard the legacy with great vigor. Even suggesting a change was considered ‘Sacrilege’. Not any more. When a pandemic makes decades of old practices/cost structures/habits irrelevant, protecting the legacy at all costs may be too costly.

Self-critique is more important than hubris, when yesterday’s rock stars quickly become today’s overheads.

In summary, getting smarter with every action/data point, experimentation as a way of life and ability to re-think everything are bigger competitive differentiators than just automating the past.