Information security and Green IT conflicting over enterprise mindshare in 2008?
by
Charlie Bess
Privacy International just released its privacy protection rankings by country. It’s interesting that almost every country with widespread Internet usage is marked as low on the list. It made me wonder if there is a similar assessment of commercial (or criminal) use of personal information – this assessment was focused on government use. At least in my mind, identity theft is more top of mind than government surveillance.
One of the findings was that there is an overall worsening of privacy protection. I don’t think that’s a big surprise to anyone, as Scott McNealy once said -- “Privacy is dead, deal with it” and that was before the year 2000. That level of acceptance of inevitability just seems unacceptable. With SaaS and large service providers become more prevalent and aggregating information from numerous sources, their privacy practices need to be greater understood. The current fiasco on Facebook with Scoble is an interesting example of trying to control acceptable use.
Addressing this maybe an industry trend that enterprises need to focus greater efforts in 2008 and not just in healthcare. Almost every IT organization aggregates information and needs to control it somehow, since “We live in a time when most people don’t trust big companies”.
