The wonderful folks at the Practising Law Institute have released another article that should be a valuable read for in-house counsel and corporate MIS departments. This time it’s An In-Depth Look at the Architecture of an Information Management Program: Privacy, Security & Customer relationship in an Age of ID Theft and Terrorism by Margaret P. Eisnehauer (Hunton & Williams LLP). PLI’s take on the article is as follows:
"She notes that our age is an historic first, as in the past, companies didn’t worry that the products they developed and used to enhance business and profit would become tools to undermine that very progress. That has changed. Now companies that develop information-based, business-enhancing tools often find themselves in the precarious position of having developed something that creates the conditions that leads to disasters like those that befell MCI, CitiGroup and MasterCard. Eisenhauer points to the example of one company, which attempted "to build smart fraud prevention products to enable businesses to verify presenters of checks (and to deter ID theft) using photographic identification." This noble effort became "a political and social firestorm when consumers discovered that the company was attempting to buy digitized copies of the photos on state drivers’ license records." So in that case, legitimate fraud prevention efforts raised, in people’s minds, the corollary specter of ID theftthe very thing that it was intended to prevent.
Eisenhauer asserts four risks that every organization must navigate regarding information use:
* Legal Compliance – with federal, state and local laws regarding privacy, data protection and government reporting at the beginning of the line;
* Reputation – information privacy has everything to do with protecting a company’s reputation as a trusted institution;
* Investment – companies that are information-dependent "must understand the real revenue implications of its corporate information assets;"
* Reticence – companies should not be frightened out of using information, for that will undermine competitive position."
Read more by downloading the full article today at PLI (Adobe PDF).
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