Privacy And Internet Marketing

I have a sister who is a consumer protector's dream come true, and a novice marketer's worst nightmare. She can ask fifty gazillion questions, she wants background information, definitions, history and who knows what all before she decides to buy, join or subscribe to anything. And while I think that any consumer should be well-informed, she can be a real pain.

And, when it comes to offering up anything close to personal information, she's like a big mama grizzly bear protecting her lone surviving cub. She can be fearsome and ferocious!

While I like having my private information kept private just as much as the next guy (or gal), I have a little different take on private information in terms of what I am willing to share. In this day and age of information that's captured, bought, sold or traded from institutions as innocuous as your local grocery, your pharmacy or the place where you gas up your car, I no longer have many illusions about the amount of privacy that I can still claim to have. When satellites orbiting in space can snap pictures of my dog taking a leak in the yard, I kinda figure privacy is something that went the way of the dinosaurs. It disappeared sometime during the last century when we weren't paying close enough attention. What we have today is really just an illusion of privacy, not the real thing.

That being said, I'm a firm believer in the right of any individual to do just cause in protecting private and sensitive information. I also believe that when people do entrust certain information to others as a client or customer, they have a right to expect the information is handled with care.

In my opinion, you as a website owner, have a responsibility to keep sensitive information secure, and to refrain from misusing, sharing or selling private information unless you have received express permission from your client and customer to do so.

Although the Internet is by no means the only repository for individuals' private information, it has certainly made the misuse, sharing and selling of such information much easier to accomplish and harder to combat.

Make certain as you create and develop web-based business and product sites, that you take care when dealing with information of a personal or sensitive nature, and that you prominently display access to policies and guidelines, such as your business and website's privacy policies, that provide detailed information regarding how you handle private information.