Dan Gillmor explains privacy for those who have not received the memo

From Computerworld

It's routine to assume that garnering more data is better. The ability to store everything under the sun is growing along with disk space. If your company sells widgets that end up in consumers' homes and you plan to put radio frequency identification tags on these goods to help make the supply chain more efficient, that's great. But you should be planning now to make sure the tags stop working when they leave the store, because people like me will shout from the rooftops if you don't.

No matter how much data you collect, IT staffs should convince CIOs -- who in turn should convince CEOs -- that it's far better to build more protection into databases early than to attempt to bolt it on later. And they should convince them to support stronger pro-privacy laws while they're at it.

Respecting privacy is good public relations.