Real-Life Decision Making
You are the chief privacy officer for a software company. The CEO of your
organization has decided to offer customers free email accounts. But she has
decided that your company will not provide that service directly. She has
found a number of possible partners who will provide the service.
Your CEO asks you to evaluate these potential partners with regards to
their privacy policy. "It is very important that our partners observe the
same high standards with regards to policy that we do," she says. "We are
trusting these people with our customers' private information. We need
to be sure that they will protect our customers the same way we do."
You begin to examine the list of potential partners. To your surprise,
you realize that one of the companies being considered is owned by your friend.
You know that your friend has been struggling to get established. It would
benefit him a lot if he were invited to partner with your well-established
employer.
Unfortunately, you also know that in the past, your friend has sold his
list of customer information to a marketing group that uses the information
to send spam to people. Your friend did not tell people on the list that he
was going to do this, and none had agreed to have their information used in
that way.
Your friend says he had to do it because his company was short of cash
and needed the money. From time to time, some of his more tech-savvy customers
figure out what he has done, and there are complaints and ugly messages posted
to online message boards.
You know that your CEO would not offer your friend the contract if she
knew his reputation for selling information. Nevertheless, you would like
to recommend your friend's company for the partnership. You know that
your friend would provide a good service.
"If he has a good contract like this one, he won't sell the information
anymore," you think to yourself. "He only did that because he had a bad cash
flow problem."
What do you do?