Like Facebook, mobile-for-advertising could be a compelling proposition, as there's a clear consumer benefit — a measurable exchange of value, with privacy on one side, and connectivity on the other.
It seems that this has come to fruition in the UK: O2, the Telefonica subsidiary, has launched a free Wi-Fi service, where a user pays with their data, rather than in money.
In return for 10GB of free Wi-Fi per month, you just need to agree to:
"information about you and your use of the Service including, but not limited to, how you conduct your account being used, analysed and assessed by us and the other parties identified in the paragraph above and selected third parties for marketing purposes including, amongst other things, to identify and offer you by phone, post, our mobile network, your mobile phone, email, text (SMS), media messaging, automated dialling equipment or other means, any further products, services and offers which we think might interest you."You can opt-out at any time, but it would seem that (not unreasonably) this means that you lose access to the service.
Nothing is for free!
ReplyDelete… also it is getting more difficult for operators to make profit
• the expensive telecommunication networks they have deployed and need to upgrade offering better/optimum accessibility for the user to cope with the competitors
• the real money is going to the services not offered by the same operator but the service providers, or any application you buy or pay for using it.
So to make profit operators, as shown here, seem to be turning the business to sell “private” opted in (!!) data for marketing purposes …among other methods of making money as for example charging for the services carried normally transparent over the infrastructure they offer or trying to provide a better connectivity for these services for more money.