LO 8.1.2.B

Learning Objective: Describe a concern for each of the three main privacy issues: customer profiling, group privacy, and data security.

Review

• Customer profiling

The information collected by some organizations enables them to create profiles of their customers. While this is mainly used for marketing purposes, it can also be used to determine personal attributes about consumers.

The problem is that profiling can be used to assess the ability of customers to pay for a particular product/service, find housing, predict job security, or influence access to credit.

• Group privacy

The information that big data can reveal can be very valuable but it brings with it serious concerns. In fact, datasets could easily be acquired by companies with ethically questionable marketing strategies or political groups that want to use the information to target certain groups of people.

• Data security

A pressing issue is the security of personal data and the way companies ensure their databases are protected from unauthorized users. Customers and other stakeholders must be sure that the information they provide is securely and confidentially stored. It is worth noting that threats to data security might be external (hackers) and internal (disloyal employees).