Consumer Privacy

Consumers are losing their privacy more and more. Big companies are now using their loyalty memberships to get more information on the each individual customer. People may not know that when they enter into an agreement to become a member of a loyalty program, they are signing away their personal information and privacy. I believe that this is a breach of ethics. Companies should explicitly tell you when entering into an agreement, who can see your information and what it will be used for.

Companies are using our information to market on more of an personalized level instead of to the masses. Sears is using their customer data to do just that.  John Perrone of Sears said, “We [as people] want personalized experiences. They mean more to us and are more relevant. I hadn’t thought about it much until we were getting into that level of personalization because it wasn’t possible before these tools became available. Now you can get very personalized.” I think this is somewhat true, however I don’t think they should have access to all of our information to enable them to offer personalization.

In an article titled How Companies Learn Your Secrets, it explains how target collects data on almost every person that walks into their stores. It says that they assign each customer a “guest ID”, which is keeps track of all of your purchases, demographic information, and Internet history. This is a HUGE breach of ethics and privacy. No company should be allowed to buy that kind of information about a person unless they are given consent from the person.

We as consumers need to be more careful about how freely we give out our personal information. I’m sure that the ways that companies go about gathering this data is legal but that doesn’t necessarily make it ethical.