Back in the day when calling a company you’d often hear a messaging saying that “your call may be monitored”, which I suspect was true. We hear the same thing on those calls today, but it’s a lie — your call absolutely is being recorded and studied (and with AI, even moreso).
As Seth Godin said in his book “The Song of Significance“:
“Your call may be monitored”. Except not the way we expected — now it’s every call, all the time.
It goes well beyond that. We all know how much we’re being tracked online by cookies, ads, and social networks, but little things do more than you expect too.
I recently reached out to a client about an overdue invoice and they said “I’m sorry, I never got it. Can you please re-send it?“, seemingly unaware that we know that isn’t true. We sent a month ago, and they viewed it twice the next day. Of course, we didn’t want to damage the relationship by calling them out and we were happy to re-send, but you can’t just hide even on little things like that.
The chat sees all
The big one that surprised me a few years ago is when we put a chatbot on the GreenMellen site, and I was the one that generally was running it. It wasn’t a great fit for us so we took it down a few weeks later, but it opened my eyes in a big way — we could see everything the person on the other end was typing. Not just when they pressed “enter”, but every keystroke.
It was kind of agonizing. I’d be watching people type, and I knew exactly where their question was going, but I couldn’t answer too quickly because they didn’t know I could see. Worse, I’d have some people type their question, then delete it, re-word it, erase another word or two, and keep tweaking it, while I had to wait around for them to officially submit it so I could answer.
The point here is that “they” can see everything. Ad companies know what sites you’ve visited, chatbots know everything you type, companies know when you view their invoices, and every call you make to a big corporation is being recorded and studied by them.
There’s not much you can do with this info, since most of it you already knew anyhow and all of it is hard avoid, but just be aware of how much others can see with every little action you make online.
