Posts by jchevali

Post Office services are truly awful.

They don't even run their own financial services (the likes of Bank of Ireland UK do), and you can't even open or operate the said accounts at Post Offices.

Their foreign currency exchange rates are truly awful. Stationery bought at Post Office shops is always expensive. The price of stamps has gone up much faster than inflation since the turn of the century. And I could go on.

It's all about the brand apparently, but it's been so bad for so long that I can't understand how anyone can trust it. Meanwhile, smaller post offices keep on closing. Hopefully one day they'll be all gone.

It looks like the managers (manipulators) + the stooges (failed hackers) underneath were too busy looking after themselves --their own careers and, while they were earning money, economy of time/effort-- to bother about protecting their customers. But why single out Equifax? Doesn't that happen in every company that reaches a certain size + a certain notoriety? I.e., institutionalized mediocrity and complacency?

Forgot to add "and then the mice were killed", as all animals participating in experiments are routinely destroyed as soon as the results are obtained and whether the experiment succeeds or not.

Stop ganging up on Facebook. What are they? The pick of the month? Martin Lewis isn't a saint. Both Lewis and Zukerberg are business men. They created a brand, now they're defending it. They both argue they're good for you, the consumer. They both give you something, take something. In fact, there is no moral high ground they can take, there is no right or wrong, it's all words. They're both in business -- let's them beat each other up, through the courts or otherwise. We don't need to take Martin Lewis's side at all.

What magazines print when they run out of things to print.

"We will never sell your data or use it to target ads" is disingenuous. A statement of extreme simplicity that hides the truth. Like when the government says "we won't wiretap phones", when they know people hardly rely on phone calls mainly anymore.

When companies collaborate they can exchange data, but not necessarily with a price tag attached to it. It suffices it's part of a broader, mutually-beneficial interchange, no need to 'sell' specific data chunks per se.

By the same token, when a company shows a customer information they think he'd like or potentially be interested in (based on browsing data), that facilitation, that "grease", can draw the customer closer to an experience where the product is present, even if never named as such, or only much later. Or when multiple products are present, advertisers could "pool" their fees according to each product's relative presence.

Just as we understand the difference between product and service, we must understand that between service and 'prepping' or 'honing' a new or future customer. I don't think new advertising is going to be specifically for a brand but rather an involving experience. Just as the data you give, never clear what's going to happen to it after you give it, or how its strings are going to be pulled to drag you in.

You don't know it, CloudFlare doesn't know it, nobody knows it. The data alchemists work behind the scenes and are always a step ahead. A new marketing for the 21st century.