Mis-Capturing Data

The pressure to gather data can be at times as overwhelming as the amount of information that is available to gather, mangers must identify what narrow down what exactly they want to know and determine the best way to find it out.  One method commonly used is a survey, either over telephone or as a web-link. According to Mitnick, "Social engineering plays a large part in the propagation of spyware. Usually attacks are blended, exploiting technological vulnerabilities and social engineering" (as cited in Espiner, 2006). It is these surveys themselves, often an innocent strategy to gather data on market statistics and individuals' preferences, that open businesses and consumers to privacy breaches. With the lure of a purchase credit sparkling just on the surface, many individuals will answer surveys and check boxes without considering the security of the website or whether that information will be sold or hacked.

Mishandling Data

As Katos (2002) contends trust should be placed in the companies with whom users do business. It is the consumers' right to expect that when they provide personal information like a social security number into an electronic form and send it to a company, that the information will remain confidential and secure.  Katos believes that, it is not a problem with the SSL security protocol as the information is transferred but the real problem arises when the information arrives at its destination.

          A glaring example of mis-handling data recently occurred within  the organization Credit CardSystem Solutions. On June 05, 2005, the Chief Executive of the organization went public that 200,000 of the 40,000,000 accounts they serve with such card provider companies such as Visa and Mastercard have been stolen due to unsecure techniques in how they stored data.  MasterCard said Saturday that 68,000 of its own account numbers were especially at risk because they were in a file found to have actually been "exported from the system." CardSystems said yesterday that the file also contained data from other cards in proportion to the volume of business it handles from each company. That would translate to about 100,000 Visa accounts and roughly 30,000 others.

       In an attempt to combat the issue of suspected terrorism that is extremely prevalent today, many organizations attempt to identify potential suspects. This is done through CRM and data mining techniques, however there are also negative ramification that come along with these process’ as well. In the United States, the issue with the volume of "false positives" made from compiling personal data and creating profiles lead to the formation of the Homeland Security Advisory report.