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Corporate IT: Takes the lead against privacy instrustions



Title: 
           Corporate IT: Take the lead against privacy intrusions.
   Source: 
           Computerworld, 01/24/2000, Vol. 34 Issue 4, p28, 2p
 Author(s): 
           Gillmor, Dan
                                                                        
                                       
Best Part

Section: NEWS OPINION 

              CORPORATE IT: TAKE THE LEAD AGAINST PRIVACY INTRUSIONS

SUPPOSE THAT ON A VISIT to a shopping mall, someone followed you with a
video camera, capturing your every move -- which store windows you
looked
into, which products you examined and what you bought. You'd probably
call the cops. 

Why, then, is your company probably conducting a similar kind of
surveillance of visitors to your Web site? 

The emerging Digital Age is putting consumers on a collision course with
corporate America -- particularly dot-coms -- over privacy. Big Brother
government is
sinister enough. But the myriad "Little Brothers" --commercial snoops
that collect and trade people's most personal information -- may turn
out to be even more
creepy, and dangerous. 

Hardly a week goes by without an example of yet another invasion of
privacy by an Internet company or the revelation of yet another
egregious security flaw in PC
software and e-commerce databases. Although the marketplace is spurring
the development of privacy-enhancing software and other tools,
self-regulation --
industry's favored solution -- is plainly not working. 

Consumers have brought some of this intrusion on themselves. Americans
claim they want to protect their personal data, but then they casually
give it up to marketers.
They also insist that information on the Web be free. So Web sites
inevitably try to make money on the only things left to them:
advertising and trading on customer
data collected by monitoring cybersurfers' "click streams." 

The collection and reselling of consumer data predates the Web. But
where it once took skill and serious money to pull together profiles of
individuals, the Net has
made the process much simpler and cheaper. 

Privacy abusers excuse their activities by saying they're providing a
service: customized marketing that helps consumers find the products
they want. Yet the marketers
rarely ask people first -- a process known as "opt-in" -- if they want
to be pitched this way. And they never tell the individual customer
about the inherent privacy
issues. 

Many Web sites have privacy policies. But violations of those policies
go unpunished. And organizations set up to monitor policies haven't
shown any particular
enforcement backbone, possibly because they're funded by the companies
they monitor. 

Indeed, the market will solve some of the worst abuses. The online
equivalent of word of mouth -- "word of mouse" -- is much stronger than
the real-world version,
so companies that routinely violate privacy will become pariahs. 

But the more subtle, pervasive manipulations will continue until they
explode into public consciousness. That will lead to a call for
government intervention that will be
deafening and irresistible. 

What all this means for IT organizations is that they should build
privacy protections into their companies' systems from the start of
projects, not bolt them on as an
afterthought. 

~~~~~~~~ 

By Dan Gillmor 

Dan Gillmor is technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News.
Contact him at dgillmor@sjmercury.com. 

Source: Computerworld, 01/24/2000, Vol. 34 Issue 4, p28, 2p.
Item Number: 2780315