privacy

I thought I would blog about a topic that we discussed earlier in the semester, the topic of privacy. As mentioned, in the U.S., unlike in many countries, there is no fundamental right to privacy. And with the Internet, it is quite easy to find out a lot about people without them even knowing about it. Some call this internet stalking.

At work, in an effort to learn more about our clients, we sometimes “google” them. You can find out a lot about people this way. We already have their full name, social security number, address, date of birth and that kind of information when they open an account. However, you would not know that they run 10K’s or what companies they used to work for from an account application. Sometimes our clients have started businesses and sold them and the press release of the sale of the company is on the Internet. Some clients have been sued and the lawsuits are online. One client is prosecuting their administrative assistant for the $1 million + that she (allegedly) took from her. One client was the lead developer of Internet Explorer.

Even with co-workers, where you don’t start out with an address, you can find out the address quite easily on whitepages.com. You want to find out how much your boss’s house is worth? Go to whitepages.com and then on to zillow.com. Clearly, there is a lot of information that is out there that people may not be too happy that everyone has access to. I have also heard that you should be careful what you put on myspace and facebook, as you may be looking for a job someday and the HR department may pull up your page. However, I don’t think you can see someone’s personal page unless they give you access, but there may be ways around that. Probably better to be safe than sorry on that one.