Businesses sell your sexuality for money

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Businesses are giving out personal and confidential details about customers to third parties in a bid to boost sales, an internet security firm has claimed, with a fifth willing to give out credit card information and seven per cent happy to disclose customers’ sexual orientation–the latter raising the questions of why is our sexual orientation kept on databases in the first place, how is it discovered, and which companies think it’s appropriate to their businesses for them to hold such intimate information.

One in five said they had given out credit card details, one in seven would reveal information about customers’ political affiliations, and one in 10 would disclose their religious beliefs. Sixty per cent of marketing and data protection executives at 900 firms said they had had a data breach in which customer information was lost. Nearly ninety per cent said the incidents were not reported to customers.

There’s no obvious solution to this, because even if laws were introduced to impose heavy penalties—unlikely, given how our mainstream political parties are compromised by their love-in with the business world—prosecution would depend upon any breaches being revealed to authorities. So we can all rest uneasy that even the most personal details of our lives are logged, categorised, and sold. The only real way to even begin to tackle this evil would be to ban computers and go back to using pen and paper and post. Impractical and unattractive as the proposition is, even doing that—turning back the clock on technology—wouldn’t stop the rot because what was once abhorrent is now considered good business practice by many.

You can be sure if you ask any businesses you have dealings with, what they hold on you, they’re unlikely to tell you the truth. And then there are the businesses you have no direct dealings with, such as credit scorers and junk mailers, and so you don’t necessarily know they even exist, let alone how to approach them. Some of us talk about wanting to go ‘off-grid’ to end our dependency on fossil fuels, but how far below and beyond the radar would we need to go to escape all this rampant data harvesting? The moon?

categories: in the news