The Mark Hotel
September 27th and 28th

According to one report, 80 percent of Americans feel they have lost all control over personal information. While governments and businesses focus on trying to reassure the public on privacy, technological advances are making people increasingly fearful that they are naked to a myriad of prying eyes.

• More and more financial transactions are on line, and there are questions about security.
• Developments in electronic and biological surveillance are creating concerns about 'Big Brother'.
• The advent of 'wearable computers' will increase surveillance possibilities.
• As more therapy and self-help groups occur on line, can privacy be guaranteed?

One area of particular concern is health. Existing worries are, and will increasingly exacerbated by development in genetics.

• As more evidence emerges linking behavior to the individual…s makeup, there is growing alarm   about both this information and how it might be used.
• The lack of privacy protection with regard to medical records is disturbing to many.
• Personal decisions concerning genetics can raise public policy questions. Do individuals, then,   have the right to make these decisions privately?
• The growing discussion in healthcare about the impacts of, and responsibility for, life style choices   on health costs raises questions of privacy as well.

Privacy questions concern not only individuals by organizations as well. We have in past meetings explored the decline in privacy and confidentiality affecting businesses and other organizations today À accelerated by technology and changing attitudes towards institutions. The growing emphasis on 'stakeholder capitalism' seems likely to further affect this issue. And questions about how strong or weak unions are raises concerns about their effectiveness in protecting worker rights, such as privacy.

The public is reacting, sometimes in seemingly paranoid ways, to their perceived fears about invasions of privacy. The reactions range from holing up in walled communities to refusing to answer personal questions on surveys to avoiding mental health treatment (or paying for it out of their own pockets). These responses may help explain why, for instance, it is so much more difficult to predict or understand consumer behavior. As one example, how little, it appears, marketers really know about women.

Implications:
The inexorable advance of technology means that this issue will continue to grow. Organizations of all kinds will have to study it more intently and develop greater sensitivity to public fears. There will need to be reassurances, along with explanations of how personal information is protected, to customers and employees. Many organizations À e.g., financial institutions À use customer information as a kind of internal currency, giving it from one department to another to generate additional sales. Such practices probably ought to be reevaluated in light of how customers feel about them at any point in time.

Privacy is one of those terms whose definition is assumed À and assumed as a constant. In fact, however, it can mean different things to different people, and something different to any one person at any given time and in any particular set of circumstances.

Clearly, organizations need to gain greater and constantly updated understanding of what privacy means to their employees, customers and constituents.

TREND PAPERS:
CHAOS IN THE PUBLIC INFORMATION DOMAIN
1. Redefining the Public Information Domain
2. Privacy Protection or Paranoia? An Explosive Issue

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