Privacy Considerations with Mixpanel People Analytics
Mixpanel just announced People Analytics. This service promises that, “you can tie any kind of data to your users to see exactly who they are and what they have done.” The analytics geek in my loves that idea. Directly tying everything you know about your customers including their name, photo, subscription information, etc. directly to how they are interacting with your site is really powerful.
It can give you insights into things such as how long a specific customer group spends on the site and what features they regularly use. Really great stuff, but the privacy professional in me gasped at the marketing pitch: “Now, you can empower your marketing team to take action on what they learn.” Yikes.
As someone said in the Hacker News post covering this: “I feel that this is one of those ‘great for data miners, terrifying for consumers’ moments.” There were a number of other posts...