is scary. I was watching Minority Report last night, the futuristic action packed Tom Cruise movie from a few years back. You know, the one with that super sleek Lexus, and the computers with multitouch-on-steroids interfaces. If that movie is indicative of the future of product recommendations, we need to seriously rethink our trajectory. In case you might not remember the scenes I’m referring to, here they are below.

If you aren’t slightly disturbed yet, here is one more.

Think more about the context your users are currently in, and less about the identity of your users. If they are anything like me at all, trying to advertise to them based on some user profile created by a computer, “expert,” or their long history of purchases isn’t going to be as effective as discovering their current context. It also just might freak them out. Our identities, retina, and fingerprints are quite private and need to stay that way. Brian made a funny cartoon a few weeks ago describing an experience you might be able to relate to.