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The Death of Privacy
Debra D'Agostino writes, "Why don't companies care about privacy? Because there's not enough money to be made from securing sensitive customer information, says Jeff Rothfeder in an article posted recently at CIO Insight. Furthermore, there's not enough money to be lost in privacy breaches for companies to care. 'Most companies claim that privacy is a priority — chiefly because they believe consumers are more willing to do repeat business with them if personal information is carefully handled,' he writes. 'But in reality, many companies are woefully inept at protecting privacy.'"
Our economic system is based on the idea of "profit at all costs." I mean, isn't this what we wanted and fought the cold war for?
Why don't companies care about privacy? Because there's not enough money to be made from securing sensitive customer information, says Jeff Rothfeder
Well, duh. Does he have any other brilliant insights? Like that there's not enough money to be made from decent working conditions, proper financial disclosures, or from protecting the environment?
That's why we have laws and penalties. What we need is stiffer penalties for privacy violations by companies. And, unlike child pornographers and murderers, who tend to be insensitive to the potential penalties, companies really do respond to penalties that hurt the bottom line.
... So why should corportations?
... Do You own a GMail account?
Most Consumers, barely consider privacy implications when purchasing software or signing up for services.
Most Consumers, will easily hand out their personal information when signing up to a service, as long as it does a good job at providing it.
See for instance, GMail.
A privacy nightmare, yet it's a damn good web-mail service.
Most people won't bother with privacy. period.
Sigs are for the weak.
is because companies make money off of our information. They sell it to governments and other businesses. To many companies, their customer information is as valuable as their product/services. If you are a consumer, you are owned.
This practice has got to stop. We have zero protection from this. Our government allows and incourages this behavior. Something has got to give.
There's no money in it because consumers don't care. But apparently there is money in writing columns discussing stuff that most people don't really care about.
While I think he's right about the privacy part, I have no intention of getting over it, now or ever.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
They're not inept in the least. In a marketplace like ours where "competition" often means that you have a couple of choices in an oligarchy, if you're lucky, there's no reason to satisfy customer demands.
Consider this particular case: I used to work at a company that had a very large call center staffed. The call center, from the business perspective, was a cost liability only. It provided no income.
One might argue that it's job is the maintain income by satisfying customers, but as it turned out our customer turnover and return rate was so high that it actually benefited us to ABUSE customers to make them get off the phone. Simple economics showed that it cost us more to help people than to chase them away, so, with the exception of a handful of particularly loyal buyers, we did just that. We enacted policies that basically encouraged our "service" reps to force people off the phone as fast as possible (either service them in under two and half minutes, or lose your job). We didn't staff the call center that well because if you don't show the abandonment numbers, you can make yourself look really good by pointing out how fast you handled the actual calls that come through. And if someone gets angry enough to cancel, just do it and don't worry about it, because three other suckers will be attracted by the low price "deals" to replace him.
Until consumers wise up and stop chasing bargains to whatever poor quality store has them and starts demanding a return of actual service and respect, they're not going to get any of their demands met and they're not going to get any respect. Simple matter of economics: it costs them less to abuse consumers because nobody cares about the overall product, including service, they just think "value" starts and stops at "lowest price".
Consumers get the level of service, privacy, etc. they pay for, and since all they care about is how little they pay, that's how little of each of those things they get.
Claiming to have a privacy policy increases business (and profits) while actually respecting privacy is expensive (especially when you consider how much personal information can be worth). Because of this, most companies will share their data with "Business Partners"- and if you share your data with 10 other companies, odds are they won't all have privacy standards as high as you.
Another problem mentioned in the article is when a company goes out of business, they no longer have any financial incentive to keep your records private- it's not like they will lose your business if you find out. While this is illegal (now) if it violates their privacy policy, there can still be strong financial incentives to sell personal data.
Of course, what the article doesn't mention is that many web companies have "privacy policies" that bascially say "anything you tell us may be used against you- we have the right to sell or reveal your personal information in any way we feel like". Once you give information to them, everyone can find out about it.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I've never seen the advantage of using real personal data.
I even use fake personal data for my three eBay accounts.
I even moved my htdocs to a dutch server to avoid giving personal data in the "Kontakt" part since that's a requirement in Germany. But I don't know the advantages of hosting htdocs in Germany.
However, the important thing to find out is whether or not this can be acheived without significant risk of discovery to the enquirer. This is a tough question for a commissioned third party to answer, as they have carte blanche. I dunno about the US but, in the UK, the answer is usually: no.
Anyone who works with sensitive or private data (especially when it relates to children or vulnerable adults) has it so heavily drummed into them that security is crucial, that it has become part of the culture (which, of course, is the point).
Obviously there are breaches and slips, and people are not always challenged when they should be. However, these occurrences are infrequent, irregular and - most importantly - unpredictable. You couldn't approach a company/authority/whatever with a cunning ploy to discover data that worked last time and be sure of not getting caught out this time. It's not worth the risk, and employees are getting more savvy every day.
The absolute worst kinds of data integrity slip-up are from fucking sloppy work by people using info systems. I worked in HR for a while, and ended up maintaining the personnel data system (for about 7,500 peeps - and it was a shit piece of software). I discovered that one or two staff members were using the software incorrectly and, frankly, in a totally incompetent fashion, because they couldn't be bothered to use the proper routines. I wish I could've made that impossible, but it wasn't my software.
They had replaced the addresses of several employees with the addresses of several job applicants who happened to have the same name, because it hadn't crossed their minds that the personnel tables accessed by the applicant-processing module and the contracted-employees module might be the same. The result? I got a phone call from an irate HR manager asking why they had been returned a contract with payroll info, tax stuff etc from someone who had never worked for us with a note saying "not known at this address". Of course, the girl responsible tried to blame it on me, and got heavily bollocked shortly afterwards for being a dense fuckwit.
Glad I'm not working there anymore.
Meta will eat itself
I've noticed that democratically controlled systems, or the corporate equivalent of "vote with your dollars," breaks down when the population gets between 1e7 and 1e8. Suddenly, the political parties have become somewhat desensitized or even immune to the feedback for their outrageous actions. Corporations can essentially ignore pretty much any sort of public relations fiasco, since a boycott can't possibly raise enough countervotes to seriously impact the bottom line.
Honestly, at this point, if you said that Sam Walton's heirs, the Olsen Twins, and Dick Cheney were found in a secret lovenest in an undisclosed location in Tora Bora, writing a draft of USAPATRIOT ACT III which says that shoplifters were terrorists and should be buried under a hill of depleted uranium razorblades, there would be a five day story on the news and a 1% drop in poll/profit numbers, then it would be off to the next "scandal."
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If you want to keep something private, don't share it with anyone else.
If I tell my friend that I shoplifted, then it is no longer a secret - he can reveal it to whoever he wants, whenever he wants. Sure, I can make him promise not to do so, I can even make him sign a contract that penalises him if he shares the secret.
But none of that can *prevent* him from sharing the secret. And once he does so (due to malicious intent, due to carelessness or maybe because a supervillain tortured him), the secret is out. No contract will put the genie back in the bottle.
Same thing with your email and phone records - once some company has the information, it is no longer secret. Sure, you may be able to sue them and punish them, but your 'private' information is out - no judge or law in the world can undo that. Yet.
There is always more money to be made by saying one thing and doing another. If the consumer believes thier information is private, thats all that matters.
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
Capitalism really peaked in the 1960s when respect for the middle/working class - the center of any free market economy - was at its zenith.
Since then, we've been on a long descent into crony capitalism in which corporations receive billions of dollars in welfare / bankruptcy bailouts while single parents are demonized as the destruction of society. Corporation lobbyist dollars and campaign contributions now trump votes and letters/calls from regular citizens. Corporations pollute our waters and air and aren't held liable to the people they make sick or even kill. Corporations buy politicians and laws at will, and they're getting more and more efficient at brushing aside the will of the majority.
In America, the rich are now glorified and the poor are demonized. This is absolutely positively a direct contradiction to America's much vaunted "Judeo Christian" values.
There is no God any more in the eyes of corporate America... only money.
Corporations trade your personal information and the free trade of your private information is essential to their bottom line, even more surely than free mp3's are desired by the common terrori^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmp3 pirate. If corporations - specifically marketers - could have it their way, all your transactions and whereabouts would be public information.
The old evil empire was communism, which sacrificed individuals to the state.
Capitalism fails miserably when it crosses the "profits over people" line, as it sacrifices the individual to the corporation.
What saves the Western world is DEMOCRACY, far more than capitalism. And when DEMOCRACY is threatened, as it is being threatened by the corporate state right now, neither capitalism nor communism can save you.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I never claimed that Communism or Socialism had no such faults. Nor, if you look at my argument was I even claiming this for all of Capitalism. Capitalism as a principle falls down in many ways. That is why we don't have a "pure" capitalist society. The question is not the arbitrary ideal of capitalism any more than socialism or communism (neither of which have been run in pure form at a state level either). The question is where capitalism makes sense and where it does not. In this case, delivery of essential infrastructure, it does not.
> "Why don't companies care about privacy?"
Because most customers don't care about privacy. They'll yammer on about it when surveyed and will support legislation when they don't see it as costing them anything, but they won't do anything about it. If they did, the companies would damnsure care. A lot.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.