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North American Corporate Privacy Comparison
Scooter[AMMO] writes "The Toronto Star has published an article on a study comparing the way companies protect the privacy of their customers, which is surely a topic of interest to most /.'ers. Choice quote: 'The study, the first to compare the corporate privacy practices of comparable Canadian and U.S. firms, found that Canadian businesses see their privacy practices as an opportunity to improve relations with customers, while their U.S. counterparts viewed privacy measures more as a way of complying with legislation and avoiding civil lawsuits.'"
There was actually a Slashdot discussion about that very thing a while ago.
I just tried to call the number and it was busy. Certainly feel free to verify any information regarding this. (Google cache of State of NJ website listing this and other methods). I only wish that I could end "CAR RT SORT" mail from getting to me. All I do is toss out dozens of circulars per week. A waste of paper and time.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I'm afraid that my experience of American companies means that I don't trust them any more. Sorry, but that's the case. Three times now I've been involved in deals with American companies where the American company has betrayed one of their European partners, just to make a fast buck, including one case which financially ruined one of my clients.
You should do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, not because it's the law or so you don't lose customers.
In the end, no link was found between aluminum in containers/cooking surfaces and Alzheimer's.
"You'd probably be a blithering idiot by the time you were 45, but who cares?"
There is no link at all. "But then again, Canadians benefit from socialized medecine."
If you call it a "benefit" to be forced against your will against a "one size fits few" system that is forced on all Canadians. Thankfully, there is a southern border where Canadians have to go to get better health care. Health care is too important to let the rulers make all your decisions for you.
No science plus lots of anecdotal evidence leads people to very, very wrong conclusions. And, in places where the "Greens" have more political clout you get laws passed that codify bad science into rules that people think are grounded in something. In nearly all cases this is made-up nonsense from purely anecdotal hearsay.
If you buy (or not) something during a strike (at Wal-Mart for instance), and the shop (or tracking card) sells this information with a prospective employer, it will know the strength of your position IRT unions etc.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
According to the EU Personal Data Directive article 25, personal data cannot be transferred to "third countries" that don't provide an adequate level of protection of personal data (via legislation); the United States is one of these countries. Unfortunately, in article 26, you find a lot of exceptions. And even if the original European and American parties have an agreement about how personal data is to be treated, the American company contracts, and subcontracts, and subsubcontracts the work until finally, well, the work ends up in a country like India or Pakistan where an opportunistic worker can profit from databases full of sensitive personal data, without any chance of seeing a day in court.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
"This is all due to research done years ago linking the build up of aluminum in the human brain to neurological problems like Alzheimers."
Thre is no link between aluminum utinsels and Altzheimers. Its a myth. Its in the same category as "crystals" and "horoscopes".
Oh Canada!
Case-in-point: If I wanted to shop at a supermarket that didn't have a "rewards" card I would have to drive 15 miles from my home and pay almost twice as much for my groceries. Right now, I can't afford that. So I'm forced to give money to a corporation that buys land and leaves it vacant so their competitors can't move in.
For someone in a large market, it's easy to say "well just don't shop there," but most of America is in very minor markets. (For example, my town, the capital of Pennsylvania, got its very first Starbucks in March 2004.) There isn't another game in town. And since any entrepreneurs are either prevented from going to market by large start-up costs or bought out as soon as they become successful, we have no choice but to do business with the companies we loathe.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
"Ad Populum" does not apply here. The subject is "importance", which is a subjective measurement that people give to something. Adding up how many people think it is important certainly is valid, since it is the most objective way to measure importance. Importance is very similar to "populariy" in this respect. "Appeal to popularity", far from being a fallacy, is the best way to measure importance.
The company I work for is making privacy a big part of its marketing appeal. "Take back your data." "Your information is yours." The Powers That Be want people to be sure that we won't misuse their information. What would a good model privacy policy be for a company that wants its customers to feel warm and fuzzy about their data privacy?
I already talked to EPIC and EFF. For fire-breathing privacy advocates they weren't terribly helpful. They said, more or less, "Nobody has ever asked us this. We're more interested in government policy than what corporations are doing."
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
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because consumers don't care
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Consumers care about privacy but what can they do? This isn't a game of choosing a different local supermarket because all of the shippers and distributors are tied to the same company. This isn't a game of choosing a different banking institution because they're all tied to the same insurance companies and stock traders. This isn't a game of choosing a different credit card provider because they're all tied to the same three credit reporting agencies.
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And consumers don't care because they expect the government to protect them from everything
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I agree with this marginally. There is an overwhelming vocal minority, who also happen to be extraordinarily wealthy, who will browbeat the remaining population with "think of the children", or "what if your neighbor is a stalker", or "we need to keep track of you for your own protection". Half the voting is indirectly rigged by the enormous influence of purchasing power in media time so the vocal, powerful minority can easily skirt their issues into office. The rest of us can do approximately what about this?
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If people wake up, realize that they need to make decisions rather than legislating everything and criticizing "evil big business"
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The overwhelming vocal, powerful minority which controls the politics also controls the largest business transactions. Once again, the rest of us can do approximately what about this? Consumers are kept in a bondage, of sorts, by a tax rate which ensures that the largest percentage of the population is just barely making their bill payments each month with only a trifle left for a paltry savings.
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maybe businesses would actually have an opportunity to improve the bottom line by improving privacy standards
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Maybe, or maybe not. Businesses are, for the most part, immune from any real impact of wrongdoing. Certainly, now and again, there's a token poster child who gets a large privacy settlement. Once in a while there's a token scapegoat company which gets ransacked. These are little more than a gambling casino methodology. The goal of the overwhelming, vocal, powerful controlling minority is to hand out just enough to keep most of the public pacified and keep the debt strings wrapped tightly around the necks of the remainder.
Slavery is alive and well. It's not that we don't care, it's because we would drive ourselves crazy if we did care because there's nothing we can do about it. Year after year the political dog and pony show goes on and the consumers are always the paying loser.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
I know for a fact that amazon.com has so much data that they don't even know what to do w/ it. they track so much info, that it's almost useless because they (as of a couple months ago) have no way to process it and gain anything valuable from it.
It's very typical in the do-not-fail nature of many US corps (IMHO), just make sure you don't fuck up, cover your ass so anything that goes wrong can be blamed on someone/something else. This way, if 3 yrs from now someone realizes how marketing data could be useful to your company, the marketing guy doesn't get yelled at for not having the foresight that no one else had.
Last comment, American companies are NOT going to start respecting the consumer's privacy/the consumer until this lack of respect results in less profit which means until consumer's start caring about this enough to pay more for a competing product/service.
I work for a large multi-national financial services company, and we have long been aware how much more stringent the laws are in other jurisdictions. (This is not exactly news.) However, the interesting thing is that there has been a clear trend over the last few years towards increasingly stringent regulations in other countries too. So, the net effect is that the US is slowly being surrounded by laws that are more privacy friendly than those in the US. (Hard to be *less* privacy friendly than the US, generally speaking.)
As companies like mine get more and more forced to adopt practices that conform to the most restrictive of these various bits of legislation, we are tending more and more to say "To Hell with what you can do in the US, we'll just go with something much more like Germany's". Of course, this tendency is only exerting leverage on multi-nationals, but that is a significant chunk of the companies that we all do business with, so who knows?...
"The time is always now" - Victor