All they need to do is to set up some website somewhere selling some bogus product at twenty percent of the normal market prices and people are going to be tricked into providing their credit card numbers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books.
There's the idea that people should be able to control how the information that they're giving to websites is used and monetized in a more clear and powerful way. That's something that probably will need government action.
We're risking the future of the net. People are already losing their trust. Once you get burned once - somebody steals your credit card, or makes a purchase on your account - people tend to stay away from online commerce and from trusting online services.
I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.
We've got over 1 million merchants who have claimed their businesses on Foursquare, running specials and doing other things. What we want to do is take these tools used by the 50-100 national retailers and make them accessible to our 1 million merchants. Then you've got something really powerful.
You get a lot of apps and companies that are trying to sell you on something that's totally useless or potentially unhealthy. Only occasionally does something really worthwhile really come out.
I don't shop online. I'm always scared to put my credit card on the Internet!
Being able to compete for consumers' attention and dollars over the preciousness of access is a thing of the past. Everyone is using the Internet to globally market a product.
The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there's an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later.