Privacy and community gets redifined on-line

Implications: 1.  Sharing of information from one service to another needs to be thought out. 2.  The viral nature of online business causes the rewriting of new rules.

Analysis: My dad could never use an ATM machine to deposit money because he said that he needed to see the money go into the bank, not a machine.  I used to tease him about it, but my dad has a point with regards to this article.  My dad wanted to make sure that his money and identity was secure.  The same is true with the person who sued Blockbuster.  They want their personal purchases to remain personal.

Most CIO's came into IT when data was always stored securely in our data vaults (the data center).  But now, the web has made this data capable of being available to the public.  While this has improved communication, it has also created exposure.  And laws are being rewritten to adjust to this new paradigm.  But the laws are behind.

What does this mean for CIO's?  On the most basic level, it means making sure we control where we send our backup tapes. 

But even more importantly, we need to recognize that the ability to integrate data with service oriented architecture and mashups means that end user data could end up being exposed on the internet.  Imagine a scenario where you share company contact information with one of your distribution partners in order to facilitate better team selling(such as a cell phone number).  But what if that information gets shared to a third party without your knowledge(even if the purpose was meant to sell more product)?  What rules do you have in place about what information can be shared?

The temptation for CIO's is to leave these kind of decisions up to the "business".  But our knowledge of how information can transformed and transferred should be leveraged to guide the business in making sure the privacy of our, people, products, intellectual property, etc... are protected.

This lesson that Blockbuster is facing highlights the changing environment that business is facing on the web.  New ways of communicating and new ideas are being generated on a regular basis.  But as this article points out, sometimes you can move too quickly.  In this case, the value and the security to the end consumer seems to not have been managed well enough.  And that is the simple lesson from this article.  Remember the wants and needs of the end consumer and be sure to protect and provide for the customer.  As they say, "the customer is always right".