Privacy

By DAN VERTON (December 07, 2000) A massive effort by dozens of e-commerce companies to share dossiers containing consumer buying habits and other personal information came under fire yesterday when an Alabama senator raised privacy concerns about the effort in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

In his letter to FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky, Republican Sen. Richard C. Shelby criticized the lack of clear-cut privacy protections being put in place to govern the use of personal consumer data once software developers and companies begin to use the Customer Profile Exchange Standard. Known as CPexchange, the system is part of an effort by a group of 70 e-commerce companies, including IBM; MicroStrategy Inc. in Vienna, Va.; and First Union Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., to create a standard method to pool data on potentially millions of consumers.

Source http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/stories/0,1199,NAV47-68-84-88_STO54892,00.html