Real-Life Decision Making
You are the chief privacy officer for a software company that provides an Internet service. The CEO of your organization has decided to offer customers free e-mail 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 (unsolicited commercial e-mail) 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 Internet 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?