A recent trip down a London Drugs dental hygiene aisle made Poya Haghnegahdar pause when he saw a customer use a smartphone to compare toothbrush prices in the store with those listed by Amazon.com.
“Everybody wants value. Everybody wants an amazing experience,” said the CEO of Find Innovation Labs Inc. “The question is: is it possible for small and medium-sized businesses to offer that?”
Find Innovation Labs Inc. CEO Poya Haghnegahdar showcases his company’s app (Photo: Rob Kruyt)
And in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, the followup question is whether businesses that rely on data can assure customers their personal information is secure.
Haghnegahdar said the solution is to not collect personal data in the first place – even for customer loyalty programs that track shopping habits to make personalized offers.
Technology from the Vancouver-based startup promises to address industry and consumer concerns about collection of personal data by keeping customers fully anonymous.
“We don’t know who you are, and that’s the beauty of this,” Haghnegahdar said.
Collection of customer data became more difficult recently when the European Union implemented new privacy rules under its General Data Protection Regulation.
The new laws not only apply to European companies but also to Canadian companies that target any EU citizen with their services. Companies that don’t properly protect user data face fines of up to 20 million euros or 4% of global revenue – whichever figure is higher. The rules are putting pressure on companies to find unique ways to guard personal data, Haghnegahdar said.
One way for businesses to avoid running afoul of privacy laws is to track behaviour without collecting personal information.
Find Innovation Labs’ customer loyalty app follows individuals’ shopping habits at participating merchants and allows those stores to make personalized offers to shoppers based on past behaviour.
But the app never collects any personal data like names, birthdays or addresses, and there’s no sign-up procedure after downloading.
Instead, customers tap their phones on a near-field-communication-equipped sticker at the register.
This identifies the retail location while a copy of the store’s receipt is sent to Find’s database, where it is matched to the time-stamp for when the sticker was tapped.
“All we collect is transactions associated with some random ID that we generate. And that’s all we need to be able to drive loyalty and retention,” Haghnegahdar said.
But Ale Brown, founder and principal consultant at Kirke Management Consulting, said it’s difficult for any consumer-driven app to offer an anonymous experience.
“By definition you cannot say ‘personalized services’ and ‘anonymization’ in the same sentence. It’s a paradox,” Brown said. “Yes, you are not collecting a name or address or a phone number or an email address. But you are collecting something … so that at the end of the day you can recognize who that individual is.”
Instead, Brown said Find’s service is more akin to “pseudonymization,” whereby businesses and users mask certain information. But she added that this process still must comply with data privacy regulations.
Haghnegahdar’s firm was working on the Find app before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, but he acknowledged that when it became known that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data to influence U.S. election results, it ignited further interest in protecting private information.
“When you think about it from a data-driven perspective, I don’t really need to have [this personal info] if my intention is to maintain or retain you as a customer,” Haghnegahdar said. “Why would I need your name? All I need to know is your behaviour in my store.”
