Here in Italy, where I am pretending to be on vacation (but am really writing in my blog), I see that the law requires the following data to access the internet:

• Date and time of access
• Name and Surname
• Passport number (I actually think any official ID is OK, since I have visited a number of Internet hot spots in Rome and Florence and see others using drivers licenses, etc.)

At some level, this reduced the confidentiality problem. At home, I can just pay money to use an Internet cafe (if I can find one) and no one is the wiser. Here, you might be able to trace me to a specific computer *if* the people who are running the hotspot are really good about making one sign in and assigning customers to a specific computer. The people who are in this Internet cafe business are very good about the record keeping, and those who just have an extra computer that they rent out for two euro per hour are not as exacting. They try.

BTW, Internet time and telephone time are the only two bargains I have found in Italy. (I paid $17.00 for 22 minutes of Internet time, which included a computer, in the Cincinnatti airport. That’s about 14 euros. Seven hours of time in Italy. And you wanted to know how this was about conversion rate, right?)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I love MarketingSherpa. If it weren’t for Anne Holland and Company, I probably would never have ended up in this industry.

And the MS folks have been really good about keeping us marketers on the right side of the law. They did a great job with CAN-SPAM 2003 when it first came out. Not two weeks ago, they did a piece on email marketers who are getting sued for using patent-infringing technology.

So I was really surprised to see this piece on PETCO. It’s a great piece, it chronicles how PETCO made their customer comment section into an important part of their website. I was ready to send it to one of my customers and then suddenly remembered that Amazon received a business process patent for customer reviews, which even included leading customers to a webform to fill out that review.

Whether Amazon is planning to pursue the patent or not, and even if PETCO’s customer review system is outside of the Amazon patent, I thought MarketingSherpa should have pointed out the legal pitfalls. Maybe they will down the road.

Robbin
LunaMetrics