Dear Valued Framework Customer,
We are writing to inform you of a data breach at our business intelligence database provider Metabase that resulted in an attacker accessing customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Your information was in the database that was accessed in this breach. This breach did not include order or payment information.
Just arrived into my inbox.
I agree with that as a model for prediction of behaviour, i don’t agree that there is a need.
There is obviously a want , but unless there is an existential requirement for data collection like that, the need is speculative.
I think the want tends to become a need (not for every business in every market) because of a few pressures, among which is the competitive pressure for capital. If this business won’t deliver growing profits, capital would move into another that would. Without capital, there’s no money for procuring the means to do new product. I think that gives the basic pressure for profit maximization that we see around us. It’s not universal - non-profits, private firms which don’t take outside capital whose owners are opposed to profit maximization, and some others tend to not be subject to it. So for some types of businesses I think it qualifies as need, or else they risk their survival and therefore the usually high compensation of their exec layers. I’m not married to proving it need and not want, just thought you might not have looked at it from this angle.
I have and do look at it from that angle, my point was that the need for data collection isn’t a guaranteed thing.
Even if you narrow it down to just the subset of companies for which continuous “shareholder value” is a requirement.
If it was the only avenue to profit i’d agree the need was universal, but there are other ways, some mutually exclusive.
Though i will conceded that data collection is one of the common ones.