Corporate Privacy

One of the most serious privacy implications of the Internet in recent times stems from its ability to connect computers and share information between them. This has given rise to the threat of unintended information sharing – either by accident or more maliciously. For large corporations with many employees, this is a very serious concern. If those corporations also store personal and private records of their employees and customers, as most do, this then becomes a privacy concern not only for that company but also all its customers. The need to keep such confidential information private is obvious – if at the very least to keep the trust of their customers.

Employees

In a modern company, it is ever more likely that every employee will have their own access to the Internet, both from within the company and quite probably also from home – and increasingly often, ways to access sensitive information from within the company whilst at home. Disregarding for the moment any possible malicious intent, this provides a myriad of privacy concerns where employees could accidentally grant access to private information to third parties, via any number of possible ways from within work or at home, or even accidentally access private information not intended for themselves. The very nature of the Internet and the wide range of different applications and methods used to connect people and computers together over the Internet, creating numerous ways in which people can accidentally leak sensitive and private information to others makes it increasingly difficult to guard against privacy leaks.

Consumer Trust

Corporations are increasingly seeing the Internet as a major source of revenue and advertising. Consumer trust hinges around concerns about Internet privacy, making the issue very important for an Internet corporation’s bottom line. This has led to another problem where companies sometimes do not report breaches of security that might have privacy implications for fear of losing consumer trust.

Consumer trust has been hurt by many recent cases of Internet fraud.

Considerable sums of money are lost due to Internet fraud.

Internet Billing

Many online businesses rely heavily on various methods of online payment for their goods and services, however many customers are rightly wary of giving out payment details over a possibly insecure Internet to a possibly insecure company. With the abundance of highly suspect companies attempting to sell, or perhaps pretending to sell, highly doubtful products in recent times and a few highly publicised cases of online fraud, companies must make it very clear what measures they are taking to retain the integrity of the privacy of their customer’s information.

Privacy Policy

The Internet is a global phenomenon, allowing people from one country to interact and possibly do business with people from another country. This, together with the relative recency of the Internet, has meant that, unlike most other fields, there is often no clear law protecting anyone’s privacy. This leaves consumers hanging when dealing with a web site – the site can often do pretty well as it wishes with your private information, including perhaps selling it to third parties for use in advertising or worse. The usual way to overcome this shortcoming is for a site to provide a legal privacy statement detailing how it will use your private information, and more importantly, how it won’t use it. Consumers should be very wary of any site without a stated privacy policy and corporations should engender the trust of their customers by providing a clear, concise privacy policy on their web site.

Proceed to Protecting Your Privacy