How to Collect Less User Data to Get Better Results

Nowadays it seems that most companies are focused on gathering more and more user data to be successful. What if I told you that you could get better results by collecting only the minimum amount of data possible?
Think about it. Why do you need to know all the specific details of your user’s digital experience? If you were on their shoes, would you be comfortable sharing every move you make and every breath you take? Probably not.
Let me explain how your company can learn to use less data, and why it’s important to stop focusing on the quantity to focus on the quality.
The Problem
There is a common belief that more data is a competitive advantage between companies. However, when most of the efforts are centered on collecting data instead of understanding what it’s for, we run into a problem.
Imagine that you have a stored profile about “customer A”. What do you need to know to provide a better service? Age, country, email, and some basic record of their purchases, maybe. Do you really need to know their precise location and their list of family and friends?
The more information that you have on someone, the riskier it becomes to protect it. We’ve all heard countless cases of security leaks and data breaches from big companies that prove that a couple of hackers can steal sensitive information to commit fraud and other cybercrimes. If it happens to your company, you will lose the trust of your customers and damage your brand’s reputation in the process.

But privacy is not the only problem, there’s also money. The cost of operation and storage is more expensive when companies try to gather more data than they can chew. What’s the solution, then?
Focus more on group data instead of individual data.
The Less You Know The Better
When companies get obsessed with individual data, they are often missing the big picture. The more valuable insights come from discovering trends and patterns which can only be seen at a larger scale. Otherwise, you will store a ton of unnecessary information about every single user that’s more valuable to them than to your company. This practice is harmful to both ends.
The secret is how you process and analyze the data you collect. You could look at an IP prefix instead of a single IP address to learn all the information you need from your customers. By focusing on the group level you can actually build more sophisticated features on your website that will get you more relevant results. For example, picture a feature that is able to calculate the total amount of transactions from a device where the amount of each transaction exceeds a specific limit. That way, you don’t need to know every single transaction amount from each customer.
We can achieve this thanks to our current technology, more precisely, unsupervised machine learning (UML). Thanks to this tech, any company can review users at a group level and find patterns that will help them predict their future behavior instead of collecting data user by user, which is a more expensive and unreliable approach.
Your company might already have all the data you need, but if you’re not using it effectively, collecting more is a waste of time and resources.
UML reduces the amount of information that companies need to collect which is not only good to appease their customers and respect their privacy but is also necessary to discover new patterns that the traditional supervised machine learning wouldn’t notice.
The key is to find a middle ground where ethics and data intelligence meet. One does not counter the other. Learning how to work for both angles hand by hand will give you a competitive advantage and keep your customers happy at the same time.
So what are you waiting for? If you change your approach to data collection, you can change your company for the better.
