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.'"

Comments

well, duh

[oohshiny]

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.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Communism vs crony Capitalism

[Travoltus]

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.