Recently Facebook announced that it will stop using data from third-party data aggregators to supplement its own data that it uses for ad targeting. What does this mean for car dealers?

Until this announcement, Facebook collected data from three sources which it used to accurately target its users with ads. These sources were:

• Facebook’s…

One of the biggest issues facing dealerships in the sales process is compliance. There are a number of pitfalls dealers face. Many of these have to do with “transparency.” This basically means being certain the dealership personnel treat everyone the same -- especially when matching them up with the correct financing. Finance reserves are a hot topic right now between NADA…

On March 9, the popular television show “60 Minutes” aired a segment titled “The Data Brokers: Selling Your Personal Information”. In the segment, Steve Kroft interviewed various privacy experts who explained how companies are collecting and selling very personal information in ways…

Data security is becoming an increasingly public concern as databases from large retailers continue to be breached and consumer information exposed. Congress is holding hearings this week with top data security professionals to discuss how best to prevent future breaches. The concern is so high that Congress is considering implementing…

In recent articles by both CNET & Automotive News, it’s reported that U.S. regulators are looking to institute…

Target’s massive data breach, which caused an estimated 40 million credit and debit cards to be compromised during the holiday period, will end up costing them more than just headaches. Target first became aware of the breach a week prior to announcing the breach to the public. This slow response time imperiled consumers.

I was personally affected by this…

It is becoming more difficult and less cost effective for dealerships to attract customers through traditional lead paths. Privacy and spam concerns, as well as years of mismanaged lead programs, have soured the consumer on using quote forms on either dealership or third-party research sites.  In fact, according to JD Power, 55 percent of all car buyers in 2012 did all of…

The Data War is raging.

Automotive dealers are becoming more enlightened daily as they are being exposed at NADA and through forums such as DealerElite to the very serious matter of consumer and dealer data leakage. By data leakage, I am referring to the unrestricted polling or scraping of their dealership DMS (computer systems) by vendors providing software "solutions" that are suppose to be helping dealers organize and maximize sales. Typically, these vendors have inserted…