Is There Potential Turbulence As The Friendly Skies Go Social?

This past week I attended the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Las Vegas. Being that I live on the east coast, I had to take a plane to get there. I could have done a road trip, the train or even run ala Forrest Gump, but frankly, I didn’t have a couple of weeks to spare nor do I desire running as more than an occasional part of my regimen. Basically, I have no other choice than to put myself through the sometimes tenuous ritual of flight.

The conference yielded a wealth of information and was worth facing the perils of airline travel. In this case the reward outweighed the risk involved. The risk of getting seated next to someone I consider an undesirable row-mate or that the in flight movie includes some work by Pauly Shore or Carrot Top (or that my row-mate is Carrot Top).

Coincidentally, I ran across an article by All Things D author Laura Goode during my flight home. In the story, she references a recent New York Times article about airlines using customer social media information to pair up passengers on flights.

The concept is not entirely new as a few airlines and companies have tried to match people up based on their level of annoyance…rather, their preferred level of talkativeness while in the air. Quiet goes with quiet and chatterboxes pass the time with kindred souls. However, the idea that seat assignments based on social profiles loaded with information about careers, looks, hobbies and more  is an entirely different animal.

The concept of selecting your captive audience for the next 3 to 20 hours (we have an office in Australia) brings up a slew of privacy issues, concerns and interesting questions. While novel and an incredibly cunning way to apply social media marketing to the product airlines sell, to me, it just seems a bit over the top. Here’s why:

Potential Discrimination Issues

We’ve all heard the stories about people who have been asked to buy two seats because of their size or the overly smelly traveler that has been asked to leave the plane. We’ve also heard the backlash from such events. One of Goode’s readers commented that using social media could lead back to the days where travelers are segregated to sections of the fuselage based on ethnicity. While maybe a bit of a kneejerk response and possibly a bit shortsighted, the comment does raise the question of whether seating assignments based on personal information could lead to discrimination, either intentional or unintentional.

Here’s one to ponder; will companies who pay for tickets have to abide by EEOC requirements to make sure their employees don’t violate any rules during flight?

Cyber Stalking

Inevitably, there will be man or woman on the flight that is looking to interact with the best looking passenger. They open up their social media site of choice, browse the goods and shortly thereafter it’s, “Bam! I’ll take the person sitting in 14 C with the dimples for $500 Alex.”

Is it me or does this raise any concerns? Is the potential for unwanted attention or ulterior motives there? In all fairness the article does say that passengers have the right to deny a seating request made by another passenger up to two days before the flight. That’s not the point. You will be compartmentalized with the very person you denied, they know where you’re sitting and might be a little upset with you for no reason other than you didn’t want to spend time with them.

TMI

That brings up another issue. Social media is, in fact, social (sometimes pseudo social). Users sometimes feel an immediate connection with others they might not have ever run across in passing. To some, social media is their primary means of connection with outside world. People say and do things they would never say or do in person via the web. Point being, I don’t want someone’s perception of me, based on their life experiences, to be their expectation during a flight.

You could make the argument that your very participation in social media denies you all rights to certain levels of privacy, however, you control who is in your network, you control whether or not to share certain information with your “friends,” you have control.

In the airline model, sharing your information is optional. As an IT and staffing professional, I can see the upside for potential networking opportunities that could be beneficial to the entire row. Am I willing to take the risk that instead, I get seated between people who made their choice based on a musical artist I like and want to talk about Lady gaga (guilty pleasure) for hours when I have work to do?

There are just too many questions that come up for this to be a good idea. It seems like the risks outweigh the potential rewards. Maybe some things are just best left to chance; including your seating partner when flying alone.

You can blame criminal elements, but counterfeit products enter markets through stupidity.

The principal of Occum’s Razor is used by most of us in our day to day lives, whether we know it or not. All things being equal, the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

There’s been a lot of speculation about counterfeit produce in US markets recently, from fake Tiffany rings on e-bay to major influxes of counterfeit drugs into the US pharmaceutical market place.

This is not robbery, it’s not theft – it’s a lesson in false confidence. At some point, someone was taken for a fool in a circumstance where they should have known better. In almost all cases, they were motivated to ignore or downgrade the risk element because they had something to gain. When we ignore the tell-tale signs of fraudulence, it’s almost always because we want to believe.

There’s a reason they’re called confidence scams. The con man doesn’t need the real product; he doesn’t even need any product at all. All he needs is your confidence. This seems like a good deal to me.

As I read these stories, I’m constantly brought back to the same question: How are so many people in this country able to ignore the advice they have been given since childhood by mothers, fathers, teachers and bosses?

If a deal looks too good to be true, then it probably is.

Great deals come with simple explanations. The rent for this apartment seems very cheap, but the owner needs to leave town urgently for 6 months and doesn’t have time to wait around. This hotel seems cheap, but they’ve only been open two weeks and they are attracting customers away from established competitors. Sensible and simple explanations.

If the simple explanation is either missing – or you have cause to doubt its veracity – it’s time to back away.

Most of us have seen it on the streets of major cities. There’s a guy selling designer goods out of a suitcase; the boxes are all top end brands – Calvin Klein, Ray-bans, Gucci. $10 for the 50ml bottle that sells for $70 in Macy’s. Hungry tourists crowd round to get themselves a bargain.

Now and again a furious buyer returns shouting at the vendor. They’ve opened the box and the product is a cheap imitation.

But what are they complaining about? Of course the product is fake. They’re produced for $2.00 and sold for $10.00. No other plausible explanation existed from the beginning. You can hope that they’re stolen if your conscience allows it, but even then – what are the chances?

Some research for this blog threw up some incredible message boards where people complained at length that the Tiffany ring they had bought on e-bay was not the real thing. The price was $6.00. Come on. Seriously?

The perfume is fake. The handbag is not really from Gucci. The sunglasses are not really Ray-bans and yes – the $6.00 ring is not really from Tiffany. If you paid $6.00 and expected a Tiffany ring, then you are an idiot by anyone’s definition.

So when it comes to the healthcare industry’s issue, who is really to blame for the influx of counterfeit drugs into the huge US market? (40% of the world’s prescription drugs are sold in the US.) The answer is simple. At some point the supply chain moves from illegal to legal. It moves from the criminally devious to the honestly stupid. Breaking this link in the chain is the answer to combating counterfeit produce.

At a corporate level, every bit as much as at a personal level, we are responsible for making sensible decisions. We must assess risk, identify things that need explanation and follow a sensible, logical course of action.

In every occurrence of a fake product entering a market, someone is failing to do these things. Someone is chasing a bargain or a glut – and an opportunity to benefit personally – that is blinding them to their obvious responsibility to see things for what they are.

If you don’t 100% trust the source you’re buying from, you have to be 100% sure you have the means to assess the product before you either use it or pass it on.

Buyers across the pharmaceutical supply chain would do well to keep Occum’s Razor close at hand.