Page 159 -

158 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

Credit card purchases can
make personal information
available to market
researchers, telemarketers,
and direct mail companies.
Advances in information
technology facilitate the
invasion of privacy.

© Corbis/Alamy

activities of their visitors in exchange for revenue from advertisements based
on visitor information DoubleClick gathers. DoubleClick uses this information
to create a profile of each online visitor, adding more detail to the profile as
the visitor accesses an associated DoubleClick site. Over time, DoubleClick can
create a detailed dossier of a person’s spending and computing habits on the
Web that is sold to companies to help them target their Web ads more precisely.
ChoicePoint gathers data from police, criminal, and motor vehicle records,
credit and employment histories, current and previous addresses, professional
licenses, and insurance claims to assemble and maintain electronic dossiers
on almost every adult in the United States. The company sells this personal
information to businesses and government agencies. Demand for personal data
is so enormous that data broker businesses such as ChoicePoint are flourishing.
In 2011, the two largest credit card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc.,
were planning to link credit card purchase information with consumer social
network and other information to create customer profiles that could be sold to
advertising firms. In 2012, Visa will process more than 45 billion transactions a
year and MasterCard will process more than 23 billion transactions. Currently,
this transactional information is not linked with consumer Internet activities.
A new data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship aware-
ness (NORA) has given both the government and the private sector even
more powerful profiling capabilities. NORA can take information about people
from many disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone
records, customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships
to find obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or
terrorists (see Figure 4.2).
NORA technology scans data and extracts information as the data are being
generated so that it could, for example, instantly discover a man at an airline
ticket counter who shares a phone number with a known terrorist before that
person boards an airplane. The technology is considered a valuable tool for
homeland security but does have privacy implications because it can provide
such a detailed picture of the activities and associations of a single individual.

MIS_13_Ch_04_Global.indd 158 1/18/2013 10:27:39 AM