They feel there's never been a reason to worry about the legal implications. Businesses are enthusiastically building customer relationship management systems, but there's little awareness of how the law might affect them. The danger for firms in Europe is that much of the impetus for e-business is coming from outside the EU, where data privacy is handled very differently. The US has no equivalent of the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive. Services such as Microsoft Passport are already offering to be the central repository for personal details, but have been set up under a foreign data-privacy regime.
Survival is all about looking ahead.
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of ZDNetUK is prohibited. ZDNetUK and the ZDNetUK logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.