In our naivet , we feel safe it is only the neighborhood grocer after all. If the information exists, and can be individually associated with you, it can be obtained by the government and used against you. The right to personal privacy used to be a fundamental principle in our country. Recently, it was deemed sufficiently important that Lotus was forced by public opinion to abandon a planned CD product for marketers, which contained people s names, addresses and multiple other tidbits of personal information. Today, the public revels in the intimate exchanges between residents of the Big Brother house.
People give away their social security numbers without a second thought.
They allow cookies into their hard drives and click away access to their personal Internet behavior. The market research community is responsible for much of the activity involved in this privacy invasion. In the excitement of being able to provide 1 to 1 marketing service, we set up the systems and conduct the analyses that make it possible to profile and target individual customers. However, we need to recognize that there is an inherent conflict between providing individually targeted marketing services and protecting people s privacy . A number of recent articles have appeared in the news and in professional journals that speak to growing concerns about personal privacy.