The Internet Privacy Condition: How You Can Find out Almost Anything about Almost Anybody

During this installment of McCuistion Television’s episode on the Internet Privacy Condition, Dennis McCuistion is joined by two panelists:

• Dee Smith: CEO, Strategic Insight Group
• Jim Harper, J.D.: Director of Information Policy Studies, CATO

Internet privacy is a thing of the past. By Googling  someone or something and by going into cached sites, you can pull  back the covers on things that quite possibly the individual may have wanted to keep private. As Dee Smith says, “It’s an early warning sign. There’s an enormous array of credit card information and magazine subscriptions that all have a collected pattern. Privacy is threatened, yet there is a lot of information to help protect you against fraud.”

Jim Harper of CATO says of the Internet privacy condition, “What is privacy? Medical privacy and other is out there. The average person may not find this, but there is a lack of practical obscurity. Records exist. So from Government surveillance to marketing research and identity theft, a Google search can turn up lots of pieces and places. Not one place is definitive and complete. Still, ultimately, the result is a better economy.”

Today there is a new human condition. The Web makes it very hard to escape your past. Data that is out there is difficult to impossible to retrieve. This information is going to be with you for a very long time. Knowledge is critical and needs to be managed. What one puts out on MySpace today can come back to haunt one and even result in the loss of a potential job. The knowledge intelligence pyramid, talked about by Dee Smith is a critical component of out future personal and marketing strategy.

From top to bottom the Knowledge Intelligence Pyramid, gives data that is critical to know and work with:

Tactical
Operational
Strategic
Specific and focused information
Specific but broad information
Background information.

Knowledge today is indeed power. And the more you know about a prospect or other individual, the more effective you can be.

Thank you for watching this segment on the Internet privacy condition,

Niki McCuistion
Producer

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1518 – 07.19.09